I understand what it is. I still don’t want the encrypted blobs outside my control.

Sure, they’re useless without the keys. But the key is also useless without the blobs, in the sense that I don’t have my photos.

Sounds like you want your photos on a unencrypted HDD, which you can do regardless of whether or not a cloud service is E2EE, so I don't see how E2EE is an issue...

No, I do not want that. I have my photos on an encrypted HDD, in a server running Immich in my basement, and I connect to it using WireGuard. Everything is encrypted at rest and in transit.

There’s no cloud.

I get to reap the benefits of not using E2EE encryption, like offloading machine learning tasks and transcoding to a server, and having extremely simple clients that don’t need to roll their own application-layer crypto.

E2EE isn’t a silver bullet. It solves a specific problem — trusting the server — and introduces another — pushing complexity to the clients. If you already trust the server, because it’s running on your infrastructure, there are no upsides.

And Immich was designed specifically for self-hosting. To not depend on the cloud. It makes no sense for it to make trade-offs that don’t benefit self-hosting.