Other Alternative to Photos App?

[bumpylumpy]

Given the news of Apple scanning photos in iOS15, what 3rd party Photos app are you considering?

I'm managing my photos on my Mac with GraphicConverter, so this app would not need to sync with my Apple Photos library. All of my photos are just files in directories on my Mac.

I don't need to do any editing on the iPhone; just viewing and filtering, mainly by time and geography. So far, this is the only one I've found that looks promising:

It's called myPics by a company called Naia:

MyPics

naia.co.jp

It's $5 or $9 to unlock the Pro vs Expert features, but I'm not entirely sure which level I'd need.

 

[Shirasaki]

Here is the reality: unless you could find a camera app that saves photo into their own Documents folder instead of Photo Library, Apple Photo app couldn’t really be replaced.

Or you never take anymore photo using your iOS device camera.

 

[Saladin12]

Unless I've understood the news incorrectly I thought the scanning only happens if uploaded to iCloud? In which case just use the photos app but turn off iCloud photos?

 

[Expos of 1969]

Unless I've understood the news incorrectly I thought the scanning only happens if uploaded to iCloud? In which case just use the photos app but turn off iCloud photos?

Apple may have said that but why should they be believed?

 

[EuroChilli]

Unless I've understood the news incorrectly I thought the scanning only happens if uploaded to iCloud? In which case just use the photos app but turn off iCloud photos?

This. I don't use iCloud Photos, I just plug my phone into my laptop and offload photos into a library on an external SSD which is in turn backed up with Time Machine on yet another drive. Still way more convenient than taking rolls of 35mm film to the photo lab. I also can't really use iCloud photos anyway because between my wife and I we have well over 2TB of photos and videos. It will cost a small fortune to pay the storage and for an internet connection fast enough to upload it all.

If you only have a phone and no computer, just get something like the credit card size Samsung T5/7 and sync your phone directly with that.

Yes, I've looked for a Photos app replacement, but I don't think there is one. You can always try Lightroom, but I think you need a Masters in Computer Sciences to use it, and it costs about 12 bucks, a month.

 

[Ethrem]

ALL cloud providers scan your photos. Apple is just catching up and trying to do it with the best privacy they can offer.

The only decent alternative I’ve seen is Google Photos and they have already admitted to CSAM scanning.

Our efforts to fight child sexual abuse online

Our efforts to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and how we’re supporting organizations that are committed to protecting kids online.

www.google.com

 

[EuroChilli]

ALL cloud providers scan your photos. Apple is just catching up and trying to do it with the best privacy they can offer.

The only decent alternative I’ve seen is Google Photos and they have already admitted to CSAM scanning.

Our efforts to fight child sexual abuse online

Our efforts to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and how we’re supporting organizations that are committed to protecting kids online.

www.google.com

My wife was surprised to see some of her fathers family photos on Google Maps (he uses an Android phone). Turns out we missed a 'privacy' setting buried deep down in there somewhere. And even if we set the photos to private, do you honestly think they will stop scanning them?

 

[Ethrem]

Correct. My wife was surprised to see some of her fathers family photos on Google Maps (he uses an Android phone). Turns out we missed a 'privacy' setting buried deep down in there somewhere. And even if we set the photos to private, do you honestly think they will stop scanning them?

The only real options are to either decide to be okay with it or stop using cloud storage services. Governments around the world breathe down the necks of these cloud providers and you can be sure not just for CSAM either. I understand the uproar but it’s too little, too late, when other cloud providers have been doing it. I mean Cloudflare has a tool they give away free to all of their customers.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/

Personally I will likely continue to use iCloud. I don’t have anything to hide and if the government is going to take issue with something on my phone or in my cloud, it’s likely they were already watching me anyway since I don’t have anything to do with CSAM. I’m just a 30-something disabled dude with a tech hobby, nothing else.

And yes, Google’s privacy invasion is creepy. I discovered a few years back on the website all the location tracking they did when I was on Android. Every address I ever visited going back to like 2014 was freely accessible in my Google account. I had already been on iOS for a year when I discovered this and that whole year had no new info. I deleted all of it and tweaked every privacy setting I could find but I definitely don’t trust them.

 

[EuroChilli]

The only real options are to either decide to be okay with it or stop using cloud storage services. Governments around the world breathe down the necks of these cloud providers and you can be sure not just for CSAM either. I understand the uproar but it’s too little, too late, when other cloud providers have been doing it. I mean Cloudflare has a tool they give away free to all of their customers.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/

Personally I will likely continue to use iCloud. I don’t have anything to hide and if the government is going to take issue with something on my phone or in my cloud, it’s likely they were already watching me anyway since I don’t have anything to do with CSAM. I’m just a 30-something disabled dude with a tech hobby, nothing else.

And yes, Google’s privacy invasion is creepy. I discovered a few years back on the website all the location tracking they did when I was on Android. Every address I ever visited going back to like 2014 was freely accessible in my Google account. I had already been on iOS for a year when I discovered this and that whole year had no new info. I deleted all of it and tweaked every privacy setting I could find but I definitely don’t trust them.

To be honest, I'm not concerned about all this cloud privacy stuff, both Google and Apple. I actually use both of them, to a very limited degree. Limited, just because of the shear amount of stuff we have. A 2 month Canadian Rocky Mountain RV trip: over 6000 photos, excluding the GoPro dash cam footage. Trust me, if I had any photos I really didn't want anyone else to see, well, they wouldn't even be in any kind of electronic format, they would be buried deep in a Zurich bank vault ;-) But I don't have such photos.

What I really like is the location feature in the Photos app on my laptop. When you've travelled to just over 40 countries, you tend to forget a lot of exact locations. I really couldn't care who else might have access to that info. Gone are the days of having to write all this on the back of hundreds of photo prints. One thing I did during the height of lockdown was to scan old prints, then add the correct meta data so they show up in the right times and places.

 

[lostom]

The only real options are to either decide to be okay with it or stop using cloud storage services. Governments around the world breathe down the necks of these cloud providers and you can be sure not just for CSAM either. I understand the uproar but it’s too little, too late, when other cloud providers have been doing it. I mean Cloudflare has a tool they give away free to all of their customers.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/

Personally I will likely continue to use iCloud. I don’t have anything to hide and if the government is going to take issue with something on my phone or in my cloud, it’s likely they were already watching me anyway since I don’t have anything to do with CSAM. I’m just a 30-something disabled dude with a tech hobby, nothing else.

And yes, Google’s privacy invasion is creepy. I discovered a few years back on the website all the location tracking they did when I was on Android. Every address I ever visited going back to like 2014 was freely accessible in my Google account. I had already been on iOS for a year when I discovered this and that whole year had no new info. I deleted all of it and tweaked every privacy setting I could find but I definitely don’t trust them.

That's pretty much my take on this and other things, I don't have anything to hide and whatever they scan wouldn't interest them in the slightest, they're not looking for me at any time because there is nothing to look at.

 

[bumpylumpy]

Here is the reality: unless you could find a camera app that saves photo into their own Documents folder instead of Photo Library, Apple Photo app couldn’t really be replaced.

Or you never take anymore photo using your iOS device camera.

Yes, that's exactly it! I only use my camera to take QR codes of menus these days. It's not nearly as good as my digital cameras. All of my camera's photos get imported using the built-in Macos Image Capture program and those bypass the Photos Library entirely; they literally ask you which directory you want to import the files into.

On my Mac I have tried using Adobe Lightroom, but it's kind of overkill for my needs. GraphicConverter does a good job.

So to answer my own question, it appears I will give Naia a shot. I was just hoping someone else here has used it or something similar and can offer their own suggestions!

Another reason I was thinking of trying another iPhone photo browser is I just don't like how much time my iPhone spends doing machine learning on all of my photos for reasons I don't need. I don't want it trying to figure out people in my photos, I don't want it trying to figure out whether it's pictures of food or dogs or cats. I already know what my photos are; I took them and I sort them myself! So it's a huge waste of my iPhone's processing power and it usually gets stuff wrong anyway and there's no way for me to fix it. Every time I clean install my phone it spends a ridiculous amount of time analyzing my photo library, which means I pretty much have to leave it attached to my charger and can't use it for a while it heats up.

 

[EuroChilli]

Yes, that's exactly it! I only use my camera to take QR codes of menus these days. It's not nearly as good as my digital cameras. All of my camera's photos get imported using the built-in Macos Image Capture program and those bypass the Photos Library entirely; they literally ask you which directory you want to import the files into.

On my Mac I have tried using Adobe Lightroom, but it's kind of overkill for my needs. GraphicConverter does a good job.

So to answer my own question, it appears I will give Naia a shot. I was just hoping someone else here has used it or something similar and can offer their own suggestions!

Another reason I was thinking of trying another iPhone photo browser is I just don't like how much time my iPhone spends doing machine learning on all of my photos for reasons I don't need. I don't want it trying to figure out people in my photos, I don't want it trying to figure out whether it's pictures of food or dogs or cats. I already know what my photos are; I took them and I sort them myself! So it's a huge waste of my iPhone's processing power and it usually gets stuff wrong anyway and there's no way for me to fix it. Every time I clean install my phone it spends a ridiculous amount of time analyzing my photo library, which means I pretty much have to leave it attached to my charger and can't use it for a while it heats up.

I don't keep photos on my phone for long. When offloaded to my laptop I empty the phone. It's much more enjoyable browsing photos on a 13" Retina screen than a 3.5" iPhone SE. In fact, my wife and I both offload all our photos in to the same Photos library on an external SSD which we can then swap between our laptops as required. An M1 Air is much better for processing all that stuff than any phone.

 

[bluespark]

Given the news of Apple scanning photos in iOS15, what 3rd party Photos app are you considering?

I'm managing my photos on my Mac with GraphicConverter, so this app would not need to sync with my Apple Photos library. All of my photos are just files in directories on my Mac.

I don't need to do any editing on the iPhone; just viewing and filtering, mainly by time and geography. So far, this is the only one I've found that looks promising:

It's called myPics by a company called Naia:

MyPics

naia.co.jp

It's $5 or $9 to unlock the Pro vs Expert features, but I'm not entirely sure which level I'd need.

Maybe you know this already, so apologies if so, but Apple isn't scanning photos. They are saying they intend to scan hashed, encrypted information. Only where the hash matches a database of known child porn/child abuse photos will Apple have the ability to view the photos themselves.

To put it a bit differently, nothing about any photo can be ascertained merely by analyzing the hash. It can simply be compared against other hashes.

Also, as some others have pointed out, many other companies use hash-matching on the server side, so that part isn't new.

 

[baypharm]

Unless I've understood the news incorrectly I thought the scanning only happens if uploaded to iCloud? In which case just use the photos app but turn off iCloud photos?

User devices will download an unreadable database of known CSAM image hashes and will do an on-device comparison to the user's own photos, flagging them for known CSAM material before they're uploaded to iCloud Photos.

 

[Ethrem]

User devices will download an unreadable database of known CSAM image hashes and will do an on-device comparison to the user's own photos, flagging them for known CSAM material before they're uploaded to iCloud Photos.

Scanning only occurs if iCloud uploads are enabled, before the upload occurs. If it stays on-device, no scanning will happen.

 

[boswald]

I just disable the camera from Content & Privacy Restrictions and go without. I’m a terrible amateur photographer anyway, so I’m not missing out on much. Better than Apple digging through my memories. 🤷‍♂️

 

[HyperliteG4]

Sign the privacy letter here: https://appleprivacyletter.com