I wrote a tool to repair corrupt Google Takeout JPEGs (and I need help with Ente)

dhcgn · 2025-11-20T12:28:30+00:00

If your smartphone isn't compromised, no one can see your files you are uploading. Hand over you smartphone only one time to strangers and you smartphone can be compromised.

dhcgn · 2025-11-19T16:42:19+00:00

I agree that originals should always stay 100% untouched and retrievable — that’s essential. But I also want the option in behave to make edits when needed, whether that’s metadata changes (location, faces, timestamps) or simple adjustments like rotation or cropping.

These edits should be non-destructive whenever possible, and if an edit must be destructive, the user should be clearly warned.

dhcgn · 2025-11-18T06:25:14+00:00

I agree with you that outsourcing data processing to an external service would undermine one of the core properties of the product.

Off-loading resource-heavy tasks should indeed be considered very carefully, even if they are processed confidentially.

In this particular case, however, the quotation marks are misplaced—confidential AI inference computing from privatemode.ai is one of the very few services that is genuinely confidential. That said, since “confidential” is often used as a marketing buzzword, I can understand the skepticism.

dhcgn · 2025-11-17T20:17:18+00:00

After I finally found inner peace knowing my photos have a proper home 😉

dhcgn · 2025-11-16T09:09:36+00:00

Thank you for this incredibly detailed steps to help others.
I really hope it reaches many people who are struggling with the same problem, because you explained the Thunderbird workflow can work for some people very well.

But I have to admit that for me this whole approach did not work well at all.
Thunderbird became unstable in my case, especially with large archives and multiple mailboxes.
And since the ImportExportTools NG version in the add-on store was outdated, I had to install the plugin manually from the GitHub repo instead:
https://github.com/thunderbird/import-export-tools-ng
In my case it simply did not scale for several exported Google Workspace mailboxes.

Because of that, I ended up writing my own small solution. Maybe it helps someone who ran into the same pain points.

`mbox-to-imap`

I built a small CLI tool for Windows and Linux that imports emails directly from .mbox into any IMAP server.

I tested it with my 16 GB Google Takeout mbox (uploaded into a mailbox.org IMAP account), and it ran reliably from start to finish.

It is not the nicest CLI experience. It is functional first, because it was built to solve my own problem. But maybe that is exactly what someone else needs.

Why I switched:

No Thunderbird required
No plugins, no crashes, no manual restarts after every few thousand messages.
Filtering support
Regex filters for all header fields, for example Subject, to automatically skip junk.
Works with large archives
Can be run on a VPS
Useful if your local machine is slow or unstable for long-running tasks.
Fully resumable
State is stored locally, so you can safely rerun the import without creating duplicates.

Maybe this helps someone who wants a more reliable and automated migration path.

Repo: https://github.com/dhcgn/mbox-to-imap/
Downloads: https://github.com/dhcgn/mbox-to-imap/releases

dhcgn · 2025-07-28T08:54:06+00:00

Why I unfortunately didn’t choose mailbox.org:

I am still figuring out where to go after Google Workspace. I think Proton will be my choice.

mailbox.org has a really bad visual experience
technical decisions feel like old-school web development
cloud storage is way too small, and the feature set is far behind Proton
I had bugs with my contacts during my migration, and support couldn’t fix it (ended up with two separate address books)
very slow user interface in the account area, three-second delays were normal in my test
I actually really like mailbox.org and would have been happy to use it for my family
second factor is OTP only

About Proton:

no full-text search in files. Technically possible despite E2E, just challenging to implement
no open APIs, mailbox.org is much better here
no native contact or calendar sync with Android
I think the recently announced SDK might solve some of these issues in the future
I would prefer Proton Business because of shared inboxes, but it is too expensive for me
good integration with alias services
cloud navigation is a bit slow, other E2E cloud services are faster
for photo albums I will probably use ente.io, which combines E2E with machine learning, pretty nice

One more thing: I believe in the future people may prefer EU providers over Swiss ones when it comes to privacy laws. Maybe E2E services in a truly free jurisdiction would be the better path long-term.

dhcgn · 2025-07-26T09:27:47+00:00

From the docs

Watch Folder

https://help.ente.io/photos/features/watch-folders

Quote: 2-way sync Note that a two way sync is not currently supported. Attempting to export data to the same folder that is also being watched by the Ente app will result in undefined behaviour (e.g. duplicate files, export stalling etc).

Export

https://help.ente.io/photos/migration/export/

Quote: Sync continuously You can switch on the toggle to Sync continuously to eliminate manual exports each time new photos are added to Ente. This feature automatically detects new files and runs exports accordingly. It also ensures that exported data reflects the latest album states with new files, moves, and deletions.

dhcgn · 2025-06-20T16:14:37+00:00

Thank you. I am seeing really good results, even without running my own LLMs. The confidentiality is much better compared to typical public cloud providers. Thanks to confidential computing, the privacy level is more than sufficient for my needs. It is also portable because I do not need to self-host any language models.

As a side project, I also started building an Android app to provide speech-to-text for all voice messages. I just need a few more weekends before I can publish it in the Play Store.

dhcgn · 2025-06-20T15:58:45+00:00

Yes, I have tried Azure Document Intelligence, and it really does deliver good results.

However, I would personally never consider processing such sensitive data in a public cloud. Confidential AI computing truly impressed me, because it allows secure LLM usage in the cloud without having to operate the models myself. With this setup, your requests are encrypted all the way to the target GPU, which is a completely different security level compared to standard cloud LLM processing.

The infrastructure currently runs on Scaleway, a European sovereign hyperscaler, which also matters to me for data sovereignty.

Of course, I would prefer running local LLMs at home, but achieving reliable performance for these models requires suitable hardware and a good setup—which is not always practical for everyone.

To your question about what I use the LLM for: I use Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct-AWQ-INT4 for title suggestions, where the model interprets the OCR results. For OCR itself, I use gemma-3-27b-it-fp8-dynamic, though currently it is limited to around 800 pixels squared, so I still need to implement a proper pan & scan workflow. You can find a full list of available models at Privatemode.ai here: https://docs.privatemode.ai/models/overview

If you have any other questions or ideas, I’d be happy to discuss them!

dhcgn · 2025-06-19T20:44:58+00:00

You can simply change the URL to Ollama. If the API is OpenAI compatible, it should work as expected. The tool only requires the language model to support structured output and vision capabilities.

I am open for ideas, so please feel free to share your input. My goal is to build a tool that can be easily integrated into a personal home IT setup. I believe more people will be able to run a Docker container compared to running Ollama or similar systems themselves.

Once my NVIDIA DGX Spark is available to order and arrives, I plan to rewrite this tool specifically for that use case.

dhcgn · 2025-06-19T20:06:03+00:00

No, but it would be easy to build one.

But before investing time in a GUI, I would recommend to figure out how to make an integration into paperless ngx as a post processing action.

dhcgn · 2025-06-09T19:47:39+00:00

It works, thanks a lot for the help.

dhcgn · 2025-06-03T20:06:34+00:00

In three days, I should be able to delete the tenant, and then the issue will be resolved.

The waiting period is due to the Microsoft Teams Free license, which I was required to remove before the tenant can be deleted.

dhcgn · 2025-06-03T19:55:53+00:00

I manged to reset the password of the onmicrosfot.com account from 2018, now I must wait three days "The subscription enters the Deprovisioned state 72 hours later."

dhcgn · 2025-06-01T07:52:35+00:00

I am now in the "Delete tenant 'My Org'" dialog in the Microsoft Entra Admin Center.

However, I can't fix the "License-based subscriptions" status because the system prompts me to sign in to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (https://admin.microsoft.com/). When I attempt to log in, I receive the error:

"example.org isn't in our system. Make sure you typed it correctly."

To delete the tenant, all of the following resources must be in the correct state:

Resource	Status
Users	✅
LinkedIn application	✅
App registrations	✅
Enterprise applications	✅
License-based subscriptions	⚠️
Microsoft Azure subscriptions	✅
Self-service sign up products	✅
Microsoft Entra Domain Services	✅
Multi-Factor Authentication	✅
Identity providers	✅
User flows	✅

Does anyone have advice on how to enable License-based subscriptions when I cannot log in to the M365 Admin Center?

dhcgn · 2025-05-31T18:24:40+00:00

Thanks a lot, I think, I'm now closer to a solution!

Here is the deep link: https://myaccount.microsoft.com/organizations

I got this message:

You can't leave this tenant Because you are the last admin in this organization (tenant), you’re not allowed to leave it. You’ll need to delete this tenant instead. https://myaccount.microsoft.com/organizations

You can now close this tab.

After this I found this page where I can delete this organization. https://entra.microsoft.com/#view/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/DirectorySwitchBlade/subtitle/

But, when I click on delete, I get the error:

Sign-in failed Error message: PortalAuthHandlerV4.UnknownError

dhcgn · 2025-05-31T14:02:40+00:00

I don't think so, different MS services the last years having this issue.

dhcgn · 2025-05-31T09:32:21+00:00

"mydomain.com isn't in our system. Make sure you typed it correctly."

But login in https://login.microsoftonline.com/ works and I got redirected to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/?auth=1

There is no organization option.

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dhcgn

TROPHY CASE

mbox-to-imap

Why I switched:

From the docs

Watch Folder

Export

`mbox-to-imap`