Minimalist, open source, encrypted Google Photos & Google Docs alternative? We'll see about that!

Today, we're going to take a look at a service that ticks a lot of my boxes for online storage: privacy-focused, encrypted, open source, and very, very minimalist. Let's take a look at Cryptee!

Import your photos into Cryptee:
From Google Photos:

From iCloud:

From anywhere else:

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## Photos

Ok, now let's take a look at what this thing can do, and let's start with the photos.

It hides a lot of power under the hood. Once you've uploaded some photos, you can add tags to them, in natural language. For example here, I have added a bunch of pictures of a trip I made to Guadeloupe a while ago. I can type "This is my lame attempt in #Guadeloupe to try and not look like a #tourist", and these hashtags will be intelligently recognized and used in my future searches.

All the tags and the photos you add are encrypted on your device, so Cryptee can't access them at all. This also explains why thumbnails can take a bit to appear if you scroll around like a madman: they're generated on your device as well.

And then, you can search using natural language again, like for example, "pictures I took in guadeloupe in the mornings", and Cryptee will find just that, based on the EXIF tags of the pictures. You can also add hashtags to your search to narrow it down. It's pretty cool.

## Files

The second pillar of Cryptee is the document storage. Once again, it's a very minimalistic experience, with beautiful layout, typography and generally amazing presentation.

If we take a look at the documents, everything is handled through a sidebar on the left: your recent documents, folder navigation, and the ability to create a new document.

Uploading files is just a drag and drop operation that will take a bit of time, as everything has to be encrypted. Encryption happens on your device directly, and the contents and the filenames are both encrypted, so the team at Cryptee can't access any of it.

Once you get some stuff in there, you can browse through your folders and documents, use search to find something specific, and interact with each file and folder, with renaming, deleting, duplicating, or just moving stuff around.

Cryptee can preview some file formats, like images or PDFs, and the viewer itself actually has a lot of features in terms of navigation, text selection, rotation or zoom.

Simple text files can also be edited in markdown, and with a pretty complete editor: you get most features you might want.

You can also spell check, and the editor will generate a table of contents for you as you add headings. And you can get a handy panel with a lot of hotkeys and shortcuts to add that markdown formatting onto your document.

There are also options to export your document into PDF, markdown, HTMLL, or even docx.

## Ghost albums

Now, another feature of Cryptee, for documents and photos, is the ability to create "ghost" folders. There are folders that don't show up in the normal browsing on Cryptee. They only show up if you type their exact name.

## Limitations

Now, there are some limitations to what Cryptee can do.
First, Cryptee doesn't have "apps": you can't install Cryptee on your computer or your smartphone, you only use it through your web browser.

Well, you can still install their progressive web app, depending on your web browser and OS, and that gets you offline use, automatic updates, and an icon in your applications menu. It's pretty cool.

But it also means that you won't get "local sync" like you could with Nextcloud, or automatic photo upload from your phone.

The second point that might raise a few eyebrows is the pricing. Out of the box, Cryptee only gives you 100MB of storage for free. That's enough to try it out, but not really to use it daily.

Pricing starts at 3€ per month, for 10Gb, and then you can get 400GB for 9€ per month, and 2TB for 27 € per month.

This video is sponsored by Cryptee.

[treyquattro]

TempleOS! Terry A. Davis is smiling somewhere (but also cringing about documents in more than 16 colors)

[nowsuiluj]

Hmm I guess I gotta thank cryptee, I can now watch this video earlier lol

[noellewastaken]

“Not something where I would just dump every single pic I’ve ever snapped”
*proceeds to look down*
Ah yes, the legendary Nickpics

[csolisr]

And now, I wait for the self-hosted version to be a thing

[CollinBaillie]

A rare thumbs up from me, for the TempleOS reference.

[jimbo-dev]

(They responded so read the comment also)
- Only the web client is open source
- Cannot be self hosted
- On device thumbnail generation sounds really bad - of course those can still be cached but still, my camera takes pictures in sizes of tens of megabytes, multiply that with the amount of thumbnails you want to see - huh
- client side processing is limited, I love it on my desktop but my ipad pro 2018 absolutely freezes when trying to open my nextcloud - even it is too heavy, and yes I have spent the time of tuning thumbnails and caching to the maximum, and the ipad isn’t a slow device

Anyways I like the idea they have and all the issues which I mentioned can be fixed. It most likely works extremely well on small content libaries 🤔

[munkycoolgaming]

I get the feeling that “porcupines” is some sort of euphemism for something else…

[lxxksft]

Seriously, you are the person who will save the humanity from Google. Keep it up

[feieralarm]

This would be great if there was a self-host option.

[vitoru]

Sadly I am Brazilian and poor.... Would love to use it

[accidentalibi]

For the whole video I was starting at the poster with color palette. I thought that are color names I could use in CSS, but I've checked and they are not. Too bad 😁

[thespider]

I'm surprised this isn't talking about Mega, but if money is involved that would explain it.

[lightascend]

Is it Audacity in dark mode running on that computer in the back?

[Grejtcz]

Love the UI design and ghost folders, but I would probably prefer Mega

[kunstkritik]

This looks like a service that I'll keep in mind, especially the hidden folder feature seems like a nice idea (but also like one where the naming scheme shouldn't be too complicated)

[brodock]

only frontend code is opensource, not the important part (crypto/mobile app code etc)

[AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Nick. How does the word processor handle footnotes and transferring them to other programs?

[World_Theory]

Seems decent for some things if you happen to be self-employed and need a little more redundancy in your storage of important files. More redundant than keeping everything in your house anyway.

[AcidiFy]

Fascinating
BTW, did you stop playing games on your other channel???

[androidtv]

27$+ per month seems so good 🥴 I can rather buy SSDs and host it myself and still save money 😂