IMHO your marketing (incl. the title of this HN post) should more heavily emphasize that this has a native mobile app available in App Stores, that talks to this self-hosted server. There are many other private photo-hosting systems, but most of them are web-only — very few have a good, comfortable native mobile UI that you'd actually want to use!
See also: the directory https://github.com/relink2013/Awesome-Self-hosting-for-the-w..., that collects "self-hostable services with native mobile app clients." This project should be on there! (Right now, the only entries in the Photos category are two [closed-source!] Synology offerings, and one other app that's not E2E-encrypted. You're better than these — go claim your crown.)
This is exciting, I've been looking/hoping for something like this for a while but all the options I've come across so far were lackluster.
I have just tried setting it up with the iOS and Windows apps, I do not see an option to point it to a self-hosted server at all, am I missing something?
I understand :) Must be exciting to get such a strong and (largely) positive community response!
Subscribed to the FR updates and am eager to try this out!
I am not sure they want to heavily stress that in their marketing materials: they still want people to subscribe to their service, right?
If all the applications are free software, it's obvious you can do that even if it means recompiling it (minus for iOS, sorry) — I believe it's ok if they have the option described somewhere deep in a FAQ or on-prem setup instructions.
Alright, maybe they shouldn't bother trying to get listed on there.
But the very fact that the best directory for this kind of thing that I could find, is so spartan and unmaintained, tells you a lot about how rare this combination of features is.
It's a fine directory, but it's not a directory for the specific constraint we're talking about here — self-hosted services with mobile apps. It's just a list of self-hosted services — most of which don't have mobile-apps. (And the directory makes no note of whether or not any given offering has a mobile app.)
But like OP pointed out, "reputed" could also mean
> generally believed to exist or be something specified, but not definitely the case. "a reputed budget of $165 million"
For now I've replaced it with the less ambiguous word ("reputable") to remove any confusion and will pick a better way to phrase this the next time we iterate on the landing page.
So, I am traditionally somebody who self hosts a lot of stuff. I am not allergic to paying a fee to have something hosted by someone else - but one of my conditions to doing this is that there is an easy way to migrate away from the cloud offering should I choose to in the future.
To give an example, I use Tailscale HEAVILY right across all my self hosted stuff. It is absolutely central to everything I do - and I'd find it very hard to live without it. I am totally comfortable with this because Headscale exists, which is an open source implementation of Tailscale. If for some reason Tailscale starts making decisions I don't like, or perhaps the pricing changes in a way I am not a fan of, I have the option of trading some convenience.
I am really happy to see your server is open source. That is amazing news, and makes me feel a lot more interested in your product. I wanted to ask a few questions though:
* Let's say I've signed up with your service, and am hosting a bunch of stuff with you. I decide after 6 months I don't like some changes to the pricing model or something. How does one get their data out of the `cloud` ente.io - and into a self hosted instance of the server? Is there any data loss during this process?
* Your clients are not open source. I totally understand this. Do they however support talking to a different backend (like for example a self hosted Ente instance)?
* And finally - how would you say your tool compares to the two main open source Google Photos replacements, Immich and Photoprism?
You can use our Desktop app[1] or CLI[2] to export your data, incrementally. There's a toggle within our Desktop app that will perform this operation continuously into a directory of your choosing. You can of course script the CLI however you'd like.
There is no data-loss, you export what you import.
> clients are not open source
Our clients have always been open source. You can find them within our monorepo here[3].
Currently you have to pass a flag at build time to configure the endpoint, but there's a discussion[4] to add an option in-app instead.
> Immich and Photoprism
Ente comes with e2ee[5] and replication strategies[6]. The former means that we've to run ML on the Edge, while Immich and Photoprism can run ML on their servers. If your primary use case is self-hosting, Immich is the more "intelligent" option. If you value convenience, Ente is the one.
Just tested out a slow-motion video on iOS, we unfortunately don't retain the transformation.
On the brighter side of things, it's just a transformation. We are retaining the original file as is. So will look into how Immich is handling this format. Thanks for bringing this up!
Speaking of iOS and the associated hardware, an immediate dealbreaker for me in terms of daily usage is the clipping to sRGB.
This stuck ut immediately to me trying the app out, which made me read about it on your blog[0]. Oddly, when accessing Ente on the web (Safari on a Mac), the thumbnails look right but the full view is sRGB.
I understand Flutter has made some progress in this department [1], but I guess there's more going on here?
The fundamentals of the project look absolutely great! Hope to become a user very soon.
Tangential, is this intended to be pronounced like "എന്റെ", judging by your HN handle? Stoked to run into a fellow mallu founder of a consumer product. A huge fan of how the product/business is being run.
Well, no - if we assume server password db leak includes leaking totp shared secret...
But that is also why I'm not overly concerned by the bitwarden model: in client compromise (ie phone), attacker gets both password and totp secret. But so too in many examples of server compromise.
Seperate totp app doesn't really mitigate any risk factors - but a seperate hw token/device do.
You could have 2fa only on phone, password manager only on desktop - but then logging in anywhere on your phone is inconvenient.
That name seemed familiar, but had to really dig into my memories; alas, I still love your cover of Monte Re on the Baglamas [1]!. Wishing you all the best with ente!
Did not expect to see this! This was recording during Ente's early days, and that was a very special time. Thank you for jogging my memories, and thank you for the wishes. You're very kind :)
Do you provide an easy migration from google photos with full quality?
The instructions in the FAQ are a bit vague.
Last time I heard about this, Google takeout won’t let you download the full quality images.
Is it possible to use this import tool for my own local files without an Ente subscription? Because I have that metadata issue with Google Photos, but unfortunately I don't have the programming skills to write a script.
Update: This comment[1] made me realize that you could run Ente locally, use our desktop app to backup your data, and then export it back out to get a clean copy.
Hi, I'm really intrigued by Ente and would happily pay for a subscription. I love to pay for things I can self-host, but don't have to self-host unless it comes to it. Especially when there's E2EE.
However, your reply gives me pause. The website says the apps are open-source, the other comment says the server is now open-source. Does that mean there's some pluggable black-box magic that the subscription enables?
To ask another way, if I self-host the server, can't I build the desktop app, import from Google Photos and then somehow export from the self-hosted server? Maybe not as ideal as a purpose-built script? Or is this not even possible?
Hey, the server was open sourced just yesterday. We are yet to update our landing page copies, and we definitely weren't ready to be in HN today (but are glad to be here!) :)
So there is no black-box magic that the subscription enables. Our live, breathing production setup is available in a monorepo here[1].
I hope you will grow and start running your infrastructure. It seems that you have a strong technical team. Just curious, did you take any funding so far?
no, takeout gives you the full quality. All other ways of accessing your photos from the api (there is some github projects) don't give you the full quality images though.
But with takeout the problem is that all dates and metadata gets messed up. I had to learn this the hard way. There is some tools that somehow correct the dates. But it's not perfect and I wouldn't really want my photos to be locked up like that. What if google decides to discontinue Google Takeout? Or just give you lower quality pictures after some point? You really are not safe.
Since that experience I moved to onedrive temporarily because it's a bit safer solution for now until all of these new services get stable (immich, ente, etc). Onedrive let's you access you photos like normal Onedrive files so that's really good. I know microsoft will have my data now and sync is also not perfect. So it's definitely not perfect. But I had to move to something else before the better solutions emerge.
Takeout fails if you have too many files. I had to takeout few albums at a time which is a PITA.
OneDrive ceased to be a good backup alternative when they stripped GPS from all my photos 1-2 years ago. Unlike Google, there's no way to recover original files. They simply destroyed them.
> OneDrive ceased to be a good backup alternative when they stripped GPS from all my photos 1-2 years ago.
This is scary. Isn't OneDrive supposed to keep files bit-identical? Or were you using their iOS/Android apps to back up photos, and some bug caused the photos to be backed up without their metadata?
Yes, it is. Although seems only limited to Camera Roll folder. Perhaps this is why Samsung Camera built-in OneDrive integration uses different folder.
Their mobile app is now stripping GPS on upload while files uploaded from desktop are unaffected.
However the files I already had uploaded going back to 2017 were stripped. No idea if this was done server side or by the mobile client but the end effect is the same.
Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't bother documenting this policy.
I haven't seen this behavior. All of my photos synced from Android to OneDrive have GPS data, as expected. I just checked a few from 2017 (Windows Phone) and 2018 (Android) and still there too. Did you see the same behavior on all your devices?
Isn't Takeout their GDPR compliance tool? I don't see them ever removing it. Only exporting lower quality pictures at some point down the road is a valid concern, though.
Google Photos already has a public API. But you cannot consume it if you are building a competing service[1]. Also, the APIs will not serve you files in their original quality.
If they wanted to honor the intent behind GDPR's portability mandate, it would have been trivial for them to enable seamless migrations.
Now what's ironic is how Google is a "partner" in the Data Transfer Initiative[2].
Hey, a fellow mallu, just wanted to send my appreciation on the product. It literally looks great, my kudos to your illustrator and FE developers. Best wishes!
Not yet, but you should be able to drag-and-drop the data on your disk into Ente's desktop app[1].
Please note that if you're primarily using SmugMug to store RAW files, their support (in terms of previewing capabilities) is limited right now. It's on our roadmap, and we will prioritize it, but just wanted to give you a heads up.
I'm on flickr and the semi-regular emails over the past few years telling me that I have private photos which will get deleted soon, would be my reason.
I understand that you're trying to monetize your business and I think that is important, especially since you're here commenting on an open source alternative.
But, sending multiple emails to customers with a threat to delete their private photos unless they pay, is a kafkaesque way to do business. Sorry, I'm not going to pay for something when I'm treated with actual hostility...
April 19th 2022: [IMPORTANT] Free account limit enforcement changes.
May 12th 2022: FINAL NOTICE: You are in violation of our free account limits.
Oct 6th 2022: Reminder: Your account is in violation of our free account limits.
It seems that after Oct 2022, someone realized this wasn't a good idea and the emails stopped. I just logged in and checked and still have everything there. What is the point of paying, just to silence the empty threats?
I think "actual hostility" would have been simply shutting Flickr off, something Yahoo was ready to do. (Post acquisition, they later publicly admitted they regretted not doing just that[1]). I'm surprised you view getting notices that you have the opportunity to download your content (or pay for it, your choice) to be hostile. Is it less hostile to simply delete the data with no warning, like hundreds of other services have done?
We've tried hard to thread the needle between fixing Flickr's business model (it was losing tens of millions of dollars a year when we bought them, primarily because giving away 1TB/account for free is not sustainable) and giving people plenty of time to download their photos prior to deletion.
Tough problem, tough situation, but I'm largely proud of how we've handled it - there's been plenty of runway and notice for people to get their photos back if they prefer not to pay (either scenario - paying or downloading - is fine in our minds, but losing photos is not). We're not holding them hostage or anything, we want everyone to have them, one way or the other.
Email open & click rates being what they are (low), we carefully tracked them, plus download and/or subscription rates, to determine how frequently to contact people so we could have a high confidence that most people knew they had a choice and had the chance to make it.
Your photos over the free limits will be deleted, eventually. I don't know when, for your specific account, but it's certainly not just to "silence empty threats". It's not a threat, it's a statement, and it was intended as a courtesy.
I'm glad you have a choice AND you _know_ you have a choice.
I've been a flickr user since 2005. I haven't uploaded a single image since 2014. Why? Because the quality of the service went downhill and I knew that it would eventually go away.
I think we have different perspectives on things. Flickr wasn't a way to archive content, it was a way to share it before social media showed up. The need for Flickr died over the years.
I don't really care if Flickr deletes the photos or not, they were all backed up when I originally uploaded them because I've been conditioned to services just deleting content on a whim. Those of us in crypto say, not your keys, not your coins. Similar mentality. I'm accustomed to hostility.
Sending a FINAL NOTICE and then a more friendly reminder, and then not doing anything, is hostile behavior intended to extort people to pay money for a service that really hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time.
My $0.02... listen to them and shut it down and stop burning money on it. But you won't do that cause 'the choice' must be profitable enough to keep it going.
Thanks, again, for the discussion. I really appreciate it.
I'd argue that we have the same perspective on things - Flickr is a way to share, not archive. (Archival may be a wonderful side benefit, but community and connection are what makes Flickr magical, archive is a bonus) Yahoo had a different perspective. We're attempting to reverse it.
And we're succeeding. Across every metric you can imagine, Flickr is the healthiest it's ever been. More active users, more engagement, more connections, more revenue, more of everything - except people treating it like a "photo dump".
Most importantly, our members are ecstatic about it, it's now profitable and cash flow positive, so not in imminent danger (and we're trying to build it, sustainably, for 100+ years[1]). IMHO, it's not nearly enough, yet, but the trajectory is awesome. It's working. And it's working without invading people's privacy, unlike nearly every other social media platform.
We haven't "not done anything". Your account, for reasons I don't know, though someone here at Flickr likely does, hasn't seen anything. There's a big difference. Other accounts have. Every account will, eventually, including yours. Sorry you got an extra runway. ;) We're trying to be VERY careful about deleting photos.
I'm glad you had (and have?) backups. We know definitely, though, that MOST of our members did not. You were an outlier, but our outreach to people without backups was very appreciated. They had a very clear choice, we didn't hold their photos hostage, and that mattered to them.
It was definitely not intended to extort anyone - the options were very clear: download your photos and/or pay for the storage. (I think "and" is the right choice, but I'm biased... I also don't keep my photo archive _only_ on SmugMug and/or Flickr). The vast majority downloaded, rather than paid, and we view that as a win.
We gave people years to learn, choose, and act. I'd say that's pretty generous, and more generous than nearly any other troubled Internet service I've ever heard of. Are you aware of one that's been more generous? If you DIDN'T have backups, would you still have found our emails hostile?
I would appreciate answers to my prior questions, which you didn't address. Were we more hostile than simply turning everything off? It was a binary option. We chose to give people years of choice instead of deleting their photography.
Logging in, I have to type the 2FA code that is emailed to me because someone thought it would be a good idea to use type="number" instead of type="text". Thanks to browsers being the way they are, this means you can't copy/paste the number from an email, into the field. That says to me that people aren't actually giving you the feedback that you might need, or that you don't care enough to fix small UX issues.
When I see the home screen, I am presented with 3 friends with pro accounts, who have been using your service for years. Some as long as I have. F1: last upload 2011, F2: last upload Oct 2023, F3: 2021. What this says to me is that people are paying for storage and are not actively using the site. The non-paying friends are 1-5 years ago. Those aren't customers, those are people who fell into the trap of paying for something because it was a lower bar than migrating somewhere else.
Of course what I see is different than what you see, that's why I think our perspectives are so different.
Ok, so you're an outlier. Which is ok - we're probably not building the right service for you or your 3 friends (who can easily download and stop paying - we're not holding them hostage). We're definitely not trying to build for everyone - we have a target in mind, which is consistent with Flickr's original target 20 years ago, and you're probably not it. We're 100M+ members, not billions, and proud of it because we're focused.
I'm sad that you keep dodging what I view as the more important questions after you accused us of "actual hostility", though. I'd really love to understand how we missed the mark for you, and how we've been hostile, in case that applies to non-outliers and it's something we can improve on.
Was offering years of downloads on a _free_ service hostile? In what way? Was delaying deletion to give more people more time to download hostile? Why? Do you really believe hundreds of millions of consumers all had backups? What other similar Internet services are better examples of handling a situation like this?
Or are you just trolling and I've been feeding a troll (if so, congrats, I feel like my troll detection is relatively high)?
I'm not trolling. I'm just having a conversation trying to find a middle ground, but I don't think we are there at all. Especially since I'm in the bucket of outlier.
> I'd really love to understand how we missed the mark for you, and how we've been hostile, in case that applies to non-outliers and it's something we can improve on.
I thought I answered that above:
"Sending a FINAL NOTICE and then a more friendly reminder, and then not doing anything, is hostile behavior intended to extort people to pay money for a service that really hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time."
---
This conversation got me thinking about the history of things given that I've been a member of that site for 19 years. So, I went searching. This is a pretty good article I ran across from 2019:
The whole reason I'm having the conversation is that your statement is full of opinions, assumptions, and falsehoods. "not doing anything", "intended to extort people", and "hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time" are all incorrect. I can't find the truth, and I'm a truth seeker.
Let's start with the facts:
1. You have a free account and pay $0 for the service.
2. You received a few emails informing you of our choices when we changed the free account policies and limits.
3. Your choices included downloading your content, paying for the service, and/or closing your account.
4. You (and everyone) then got more time to make your choice than we'd originally said, for free.
5. Your account, for some reason, hasn't seen some of these changes, so you got even more time to make some of those choices, again for free.
None of that sounds hostile to me. I'm not sure who would consider that behavior hostile (more choices, more time, at $0 cost). Despite the depth of the conversation, I'm still struggling to understand (but, surprisingly, still open to the idea of) how we can be accused of "actual hostility".
Now, let's take your false statements:
- "not doing anything": I can assure you we've done many things, to many accounts. Using an online search engine will reveal plenty of examples. Why has your account not seen some of them? I don't know, but speculating that we haven't done "anything" is simply not true. Even your account has seen many changes, perhaps just not the one you highlight (removing your excess private photos). Try uploading more than 1000 public photos, as just one example of doing something.
- "intended to extort people": Simply not true. The choices were clear and the timeline was, and in your case, remains extremely generous. I happen to know the intent (not deleting any photos for as long as we possibly can) and you do not. Further, every action we've taken supports this intent. We didn't, and don't, hold any photos hostage for payment or anything else. There was no extortion, and there was certainly no intent to extort.
- "hasn't seen any improvement for a very long time": While it's possible you haven't seen any of YOUR preferred improvements, the list of improvements since we took over is long and consistent. We're averaging ~10 material improvements in the form of new features, upgraded features, and significant bug fixes, each month, for the last ~5 years. (Thousands of minor bug fixes, too) They're all well-documented on our blog[1] and in our help forum[2]. Our members agree, based on all of the feedback and data we see.
I typically love conversations like these, with "delightfully discontent" customers, because that's where the real value for learning and growth usually lies, not the thrilled customers I tend to meet day in & day out. I want to learn something here, so I and we can improve. It hasn't happened yet.
We clearly fucked up - you're upset, and you're bothering to engage. I just can't figure it out. Probably my fault. But I'll keep trying. :)
I appreciate you correcting some of my falsehoods. However, I'm basing this on my impressions based on my experiences, and therefore valid in their own way.
I don't appreciate you basing your response on the idea that I'm a $0 service customer, so that I shouldn't expect anything. Nothing is ever free. My public photos drive clicks to the site and therefore paying customers. I don't get paid for that service, but you do.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on the emails. You say "simply not true", but ignore the simple fact that unless I pay for something that was previously otherwise zero cost, my photos will be deleted. Your counter argument to that is that at least the site is still up and running or that I can download the photos I already have archived. Again, that's your choice to try to bring the site to profitability, for your own financial benefit.
I'm glad you have so many happy customers. Seriously! I'm also not upset or angry and I don't appreciate being boxed in like some freeloading curmudgeon. You asked why one would move on from one of your services and I responded in kind with what I felt was valid feedback. Nothing more, nothing less.
I see this as a masterclass on how to fail to convert a 19 year member of a website, back to a paying customer.
Yes, I used to pay for Flickr Pro. I stopped when I found that it wasn't providing me value other than "we will delete your private photos" if you don't pay up.
By the way, I did at one point look in the UX to see if there was a way to be able to view just my private photos so that I could delete them myself, but it wasn't obvious in my searching. It felt like it was intentionally difficult to even see if I wanted to keep an account.
Never once did he ask the simple question: "What can we do to convert you into a paying customer again?". Everything has been some sort of weird truth seeking mission to prove me wrong.
You can't seriously expect them (or anyone) to always grandfather in old free accounts after starting to charge money, can you? Bandwidth and storage is not unlimited.
The fact that he even engaged with you at all, and to the degree he did, was incredibly kind and he showed much restraint, kudos to him for that.
But you continued to double-down on your opinions and think you're more important and worthy of his time than everyone else. Why is that?
> You can't seriously expect them (or anyone) to always grandfather in old free accounts after starting to charge money, can you? Bandwidth and storage is not unlimited.
Never once asked for that. Although, let me remind you that he does in fact make money off driving traffic to my public images (and everyone else's as well). If he wants to give away that service for free, it is his business choice to do that.
> The fact that he even engaged with you at all, and to the degree he did, was incredibly kind and he showed much restraint, kudos to him for that.
Agreed. Kudos to him!
> But you continued to double-down on your opinions and think you're more important and worthy of his time than everyone else. Why is that?
I guess it is my fault for sticking to my opinions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you. Your project looks really neat! Let me know if we can ever collaborate. More great services for photographers in the world is always a great thing, especially if they avoid lock-in.
I suspect that every pronounceable combination of four Latin letters, and a number of unpronounceable ones, has been used as a moniker in the past, often multiple times.
Given that each person on earth could give themselves and 6 other things globally unique names using only 8 letters from the English alphabet, without replacement to make the names more unique[1], it's kinda sad that we have all these naming collisions.
It's not clear from downloading the mobile app how one would point it to the self-hosted server.
I would gladly pay $10-20/mo for Ente apps to use my own backend. Unfortunately I have around 8TB of photos so paying for a storage plan is out of the question.
This is my question. I don’t actually see any statements from the company here or in the post that you can actually self-host and point the app at your server. The app dumps you in a mandatory sign-up flow with no server url setting possible.
It seems more likely this is only open source for audit/transparency purposes.
It’s absolutely their right to do this, but they should make it clear.
I'm really happy with immich. It's amazing how well everything works and how feature-complete it is given how relatively young the project is and fast-moving development is going. I self-host an instance and do a nightly backup with duplicati to cloud storage.
The only downside for me is that there's a new release almost every couple of days, with a message that the backend is out of date. Which is both a pro and a con, but for me it's anxiety inducing because there's breaking changes sometimes and you can't just auto-update. A pace like Home Assistant feels more comfortable.
Been running immich for a while but haven't dropped my Google photos just to make sure I can manage immich and not lose everything. Updated from 1.8.something to 1.9something which includes a big db rework and lost all my user accounts. I imagine the photos are still in there somewhere but i haven't dug in yet so they're effectively gone. Lost a lot of trust for me with that even though it was probably my fault.
I self-host on my own local server on my LAN (an RK3588 ARM SoC board running in a cigar box...) and expose it to the app via Tailscale when I'm out and about. Works great
Me too. It is frustrating to see an update to the app and then have the app indicate it is out of date. But generally it still works, and upgrading the server has always been nothing more than changing the docker image tag and restarting. It's an incredible project.
Perhaps you have not noticed release notes. There were bunch of releases where you had to change the docker compose file, and you can't just apply updates automatically to immich.
I have 600GB of data with 70K+ photos and videos in Immich.
I have been using it for some time now, and none of the "breaking changes" broke anything because they have excellent release notes.
Worst case - you can restore your postgre backup (which you make, right?) and try again, reading release notes. I make backups and I read release notes, luckily didn't need to do a restore yet.
> Worst case - you can restore your postgre backup (which you make, right?) and try again, reading release notes. I make backups and I read release notes, luckily didn't need to do a restore yet.
That sounds pretty horrible tbh. Yeah you should make backups and read release note but if the software regularly needs some manual action then that becomes tiring pretty quickly when you host enough different services. Backups and manual intervention for upgrades should be for exceptional cases.
I have 5TB with a few hundred thousand pics in immich, and unfortunately opening the mobile app is slow (it loads some state from the server and that takes forever...)
I've been looking at immich and seen similar concerns about the update regularity, but that is due to it being a relatively young project. That it has come so far quickly is a good sign, as long as the release cycle becomes slower and more regimented as it approaches a certain level of maturity.
Ente Auth https://auth.ente.io/ was my go to choice for migrating from Authy. It supports importing and exporting (so no dead end unlike Authy) and I can see the second factor on my desktop without reaching my phone (through Ente Auth website).
I've exported from a rooted phone from Authy->Aegis->Ente Auth.
I have no need for their main product but they are building amazing software!
Thanks, this looks fantastic. I just installed the mobile app and will be migrating off Authy as well. Don’t have a lot of faith in Authy’s longevity after they discontinued the desktop apps, and the dead end is an issue too.
Any reason to go with this over Aegis? It's not clear why I'd even want an account for a 2FA app, it feels like Aegis would be the better choice on that fact alone.
Nothing against Aegis but I want my second factor also visible on the desktop (the second factor is meant to validate you are really you for an online service and is not meant to secure you against a compromised desktop computer)
9 USD per month gives you 2TB storage (vs. 500GB here)
I don't really get what justifies the 4x price (some of the features look like what you can get from a Gallery app like Aves) So it's looking kinda DOA to me.
The intersection of people that care about open source and people that want to backup their photos also seems really minuscule. If Dropbox goes rogue and you need to switch providers.. that doesn't seem like a big deal? It's nice here that you can in theory selfhost and keep using it.. but that doesn't seem like "a big win" either. Most people that back up their pics in ~the cloud~ won't have the technical skills to do self-host
It seems like the added feature boils down to automatically encrypting files. With Dropbox I guess you could accomplish the same, but you'd need to encrypt manually. Maybe for people with a lot of dick pics or illegal material this product is worth the 4x price
> I don't really get the business model. An open source stack makes sense for products targeted towards programmers.
> Most people that back up their pics in ~the cloud~ won't have the technical skills to do self-host
Which is why they are offering a managed service as well. Even people with the technical skills are not always inclined to selfhost.
> With Dropbox I guess you could accomplish the same, but you'd need to encrypt manually. Maybe for people with a lot of dick pics or illegal material this product is worth the 4x price
Privacy is for criminals and storing CSAM, right? Why would you even want Dropbox at this point, Google Drive is all you need. Unless you wanted to help diagnose your child[1] and unfortunately the photo was synchronized to Drive and flagged.
You have every right to expect your photos to stay private. Even if those are just a landscape. Why should you be obligated to have an AI scan them for offending content or scan them to detect who you met and when (surely so they can build a yearly recap for you, how kind!)? Did you ever get consent from everyone on your photos for this sharing and processing?
You may not be interested in E2EE or open source, and that's absolutely fine. But you shouldn't actively undermine it by associating encryption and privacy with crimes.
The GP isn't undermining it, they're talking about the strength of the need. Clearly someone facing threat of punishment has a greater need for encryption than those who aren't.
Obviously there's a question of whether people in the latter group may end up in the former, perhaps by mistake, but would that risk be sufficient to make them pay 4x?
You're getting butthurt about stuff that's not relevant. The point is the encryption is: 1 - trivial to layer yourself 2 - not a viable business model
You just need to look at Signal. It's at the same price ($0) as its competition (not 4x). And messages you can't really encryption yourself. It's still struggling to get a market foothold.
Yeah, it'd be great to have Google/Dropbox/etc with privacy. Sure. Nothing wrong with that. But you also have to pay the bills and feed your babies. This isn't a charity. Maybe I'm missing something, but this product make no sense in the market. They can't even match the market prices. They're toast
> The intersection of people that care about open source and people that want to backup their photos also seems really minuscule.
This seems like a lack of imagination, which is not to be confused with any deficiency of the software or its business model. As for me, I think this completely rules.
Does it do background sync on iOS?. There are so many alternatives to Apple Photos, all with this handicap. “Leave the app open for it to sync”
Photos are the only reason I pay for the 2 TB plan on iCloud. I don’t need all the photos on device all the time. If I can _reliably_ stash them in remote servers and have a way to access them on-demand on the phone, I can take the money I give Apple and pay for the app that enables me. But only if I don’t have to remember to open the app every now and then and watch it sync my photos. It needs to be as easy to use as Apple Photos..
Yes, the app does iOS background sync. Many of us (I'm part of the Ente team) are avid users and have a huge photo libraries, and day-to-day, it works seamlessly. We don't need to reopen for it to sync etc. The only time one needs special care is when doing the initial import - at that time, we sometimes need to keep the app running in the foreground for the initial sync to complete.
As the other commenters are mentioning though, this is all black magic at the mercy of Apple. The way we've evolved with our code works now, but who knows what future updates to iOS bring. One thing we've observed that it takes sometimes like say seven days for Apple's on device ML to pick up that the user really wants to use the app, and convince the OS to allow the app to run in the background to sync. But again, this is not something we've needed to worry about as _users_ - we just use it normally as we'd use Apple Photos, and it just works after the initial sync completes.
I don't understand how this can possibly work within the constraints of iOS, and I've done some digging in the code.
Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app? Apple go to great lengths to make sure the user has to use the app before it allows "budget" for background processes to execute within.
My guess is that as part of the Ente team, you open the app semi regularly, which is enough for the device to give some budget for your cloud sync process to kick off in the background every now and then.
For me, I would set Ente up and forget it. But I'm 99% sure in that case it would simply stop syncing after a few days.
> Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app?
Search for "SyncService.instance.sync" in the code, that's what gets triggered.
The trigger is us sending periodic silent pushes to wake up the app.
> My guess is that as part of the Ente team, you open the app semi regularly, which is enough for the device to give some budget for your cloud sync process to kick off in the background every now and then.
I know what you think, but that's really not the case :) Many our customers are on iOS, they're satisfied with it. There are areas to improve yes - the initial import is the major pain, esp because it is also the customer's first interaction with the app - but the background sync itself is works seamlessly in practice.
They don't "allow" it, but most apps that need background execution just ask permission for geolocation tracking and pretend to use it, for example iSH[1]. There are a few activities that the app can do to prevent itself from being suspended when it goes out of focus, like playing sound, geolocation etc.
And you're at the mercy of Apple deciding to remove your app for violation of the terms when it gets more popular. This is what the EU wants to fix with its new directives that level the anticompetitive playing field.
Apple can remove your app for whatever reason anyway, pretty sure every single company has that clause buried in their ToS somewhere. It's not like they constantly exercise it, but it's more for "just in case we really want to"
Sure, but "they were abusing permissions to keep their app burning your battery" sounds a lot better for Apple than "it was competing with Photos too effectively".
One of the big differences though is iOS apps can only be provided by Apple. If the google store policies restrict you, you're free to distribute the app yourself. There are well known examples of this. Telegram from the play store blocks adult content its aware of. They also distribute an APK on their website without that if you want it.
New to me, looks nice. But I'm a bit perplexed by the lack of functionality regarding group access.
You typically want to have a place for your family to manage your photos. A completely separate one for friends etc. Yet I don't see that usecase represented in software such like this (thinking of apps such as Immich, Ente seems quite similar). Managing your own photos is rather trivial in comparison, just need to sync your folder and 90% of the functionality is done.
And that is before the usecase of collaborating between participants on a trip. Or letting guests upload pictures for an event (such as a wedding). Such a hassle.
From the site: "Sync your library with your partner, and even designate them as an heir to your account." Nice, but not exactly it.
> "Can I share my subscription with family and friends?
You can add up to 5 family members and share your available storage space with
them at no extra cost. Each member will get their own private space, and can only
access their own photos."
Almost like it goes out of their way to not support this. Seems like such low-hanging fruit. I get that storage costs could become an issue, but in a self-hosting scenario that is not a problem.
Their local approach to ML is to be praised, I just wish we had different terms for Edge (cloud servers running close to users) vs Edge (end user devices).
The best decision for me is still to buy synology and store everything locally on Synology photos. No subscription, expandable storage, and full privacy. It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway
> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway
I think many people forget about this. They pay for a monthly or yearly cloud storage subscription, but forget they have to pay this amount every year for the rest of their lifes if they want to keep their data. That's why I also use a Synology disk. I also have an additional lifetime subscription at a cloud storage provider (which pays back within 3.5 years). Sure they can disappear after say 10 years, but at least I have the Synology and I got a much better deal during those 10 years and can look for something else.
Another thing, don't upload all pics you take immediately, only sync after you have cleaned out all the bad photos and near duplicates.
To be fair, the underlying storage of the synology won't last forever. A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. You also need to pay for the electricity necessary to keep your server running 24/7, if you want a service level equivalent to a cloud storage service. All this adds up. The scales will probably stay in favor of the self-hosting options, but you have to take all this into account for a fair comparison.
> A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know.
It's unlikely that people are using SSDs for the main storage on a NAS though, commonly just used for smaller parts (think metadata in ZFS-land for example), not for the main storage. Precisely for that reason.
My point is regarding writes specifically. A HDD can typically survive longer than a SSD if they were both to receive the same amount of writes over time.
SSDs use flash memory cells, which have a limited amount of writes you can do to them before they start to fail. Compared to magnetic disks in HDDs that don't have a finite lifetime of writes.
If you are mostly reading data, then no worries, probably won't affect you. But NASs typically gets a lot of writes, so you want something more durable than SSDs (in terms of writes).
The ones in my QNAP lasted at least 12 years. I replaced it just recently. The only durable storages are acid free paper and microfiche afaik. And you need a controlled climate.
RAID is only useful as long as you don't suffer more simultaneous disk failures than you've provisioned for (where "simultaneous" is dependent on your time-to-repair, since if it takes you a week to replace a dead drive, then two failures in the same week are indistinguishable from two failures in the same minute, in that you've lost the entire array).
That's why I suggested replacing at most 2 disks at the same time. But you could just one extra year and replace all of them one by one.
Or you can just use some dumb & cheap storage backend (in the cloud) as an extra backup layer, which you can easily replace at any moment if costs go wild or it goes bankrupt, without having to change the user experience.
Right. It's possible to stagger your replacements so as to avoid bad batches, or even to buy from different vendors for additional diversity (although for SSDs you have much more divergent performance characteristics), but when you're talking about rotating disks one at a time that's a lot of non-negligible overhead.
Depending on how much data you have to archive and frequency of access, it may very well be worth the cost to entirely offload opex and capex to cloud storage.
AWS Glacier Deep Archive in us-east-1 is $1/TB/month (GCP and Azure offer comparable pricing for archival storage). If you have 5x 4TB SSDs that, say, run you $200 each, and you run RS(5,3) then you're storing 12TB of data for $1000 of capex for 5-10 years. Meanwhile AWS would set you back $144/year, so the breakeven on capex alone would be if you would normally rotate your disks every 7 years.
Yes, but Glacier won't let you and your family browse easily and nicely photos and video safely stored, as Immich (or similars) does. It's a mix of Capex+opex+user experience+freedom of choice.
And yes, my wife regularly looks at photos from 3,4,5 years ago, or older.
Which is why I mentioned frequency of access. For backup purposes, archival storage might be good enough, but if you're looking for an alternative for frequently accessed content (along the vein of whatever Google Photos replacement) then most clouds will charge you at least an order of magnitude more (even Backblaze would use most of the entire proposed capex budget within a year).
But you might still have some value in using Glacier for archival purposes and having somewhat less resilient local copies (e.g. only being able to tolerate a single disk failure, or even just JBOD).
Either way, your current approach clearly works for your circumstances, even though it'd be too fiddly for me personally.
To be fair: my current approach is Immich saving photos on a single external USB SSD disk (1TB) plus daily backup on Backblaze (approx 5$/month). To maintain the same setup on Gphotos I would be paying radically more (obviously now I'm "paying" with the risk of a lower MTBF)
But I want to upgrade to a homemade multi-disks NAS just for the fun.
5 disks every 7 year on average have a cost (today) of 80/90$ per disk of 1TB. A 2TB Google One plan is 10$/month. In 7 years will be 720$ vs 450$. Yes you need to factor in the rest of hardware as well (but you can also use it for other things). So self-hosting is probably a bit more expensive but not that much, and you keep your data with you.
In any case a NAS with 5 disks is probably overkill for family photos and videos, a single disk or at most a RAID0 with 2 disks over a RPi5 will be enough for many people and way way cheaper than a 2TB plan, but obviously you need to know how to and like to self-host
This doesn't sound like a fair comparison for this product. It's true about most subscription services, but if you are ok with 50 GB, then 50 years of storage will cost you $1500, which is pretty much a cost of single Synology station with some drives, WITHOUT amortization cost, if you consider that your drives are not forever and probably need backups anyway. Of course, you'll store much more on a NAS, but if your onlt problem is subscription cost, you don't gain anything by switching to Synology.
I personally am considering Ente right now, since having E2EE Google Photos sounds actually pretty cool, despite the fact I have a NAS (a Synology NAS, for that matter). However, my reasons to not using the NAS as you could are different: this is really the place where I store everything, so I prefer having it accessible from local network only. Not sure how you guys feel safe putting something like Synology on the open internet. (Also, I currently don't run it 24/7 anyway, but that's for different reasons, which I hope will become obsolete when I find a better place for the NAS at home.)
One advantage Ente provides to a local NAS is geo redundancy. If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Synology offers their convenient C2 service, but IIRC has or had some cryptographic weakness. So I hacked my own solution with rclone and some cheap cloud storage. Well, something like Ente would have been much more convenient.
> If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone.
Isn't this why offsite backups are important?
Synology has Hyper Backup, and as you mentioned, there's also rclone.
I personally think the biggest benefit to keeping photos as simple files (and maintaining my own offsite backups) is that I'm never at the mercy of one of the SaaS's microservices being down, features being nerfed, or a company being restructured or acquired.
I do see the "peace of mind" that an automatic photo hosting/backup service gives. :) Well, one could always use them all (maintaining file backups and paying for a service like Ente) for real user-side redundancy and convenience.
TBH I totally agree with the peace of mind argument
You'll have to have the time and skills to get it, though. For my less teach-savy family and friends I always have been at a lost what to recommend. Here, a privacy friendly alternative is huge, IMO. I often recommended to use Google as backup, because it's better than no backup and easy to setup on Android.
Yeah I tried all sorts of photo services and ended up going for a Synology. You can pick them up very cheap in sales and don’t need the fastest drives or the latest CPUs if you’re only doing photo stuff and not transcoding HTPC media. With RAID and offsite backups it’s a solid and cheap (over time) system, and I don’t have to worry about some service getting bought out or shutting down.
It’s what I have, the only drawback I have is that if you want to free space on your device (at least on iOS) you have to delete photos and those are not available through the image picker in iOS anymore. It’s really a fault from iOS not having the option to select a image manager different from iOS photo app.
I actually have 2 backups, google photos low quality backup, and the synology one.
Sure, when you don't backups and the maintenance that's comes with them into account.
Also accessing a home NAS outside its network is annoying as hell if you don't want to broadcast your home IP to the world or open yourself to attacks in your home network.
> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway
Have you taken depreciation into account in that calculation? Compute, memory, and storage are still getting cheaper each year due to manufacturing improvements.
While I want to be optimistic about competitors to big tech, I always fear that if your pitch is "it's not big tech" that won't be enough. This is 3 times more expensive than similar offerings from google and apple. Obviously I understand the economics of scale. Obviously I understand there might be other factors allowing big tech to sell this for cheaper. All I'm saying is I worry this app will not survive as I don't think most consumers believe "isn't big tech" is worth 3x more.
The article and the blog post is about open-sourcing their server software though... which means you will be able to run the same software at home for free, instead of paying them to host it for you.
I'm a customer of Ente since more than a year ago. I transferred my 30K photos from Google Photos without a problem. Very happy with this product. While some functionalities where missing at the beginning (powerful editor, sharing, collaborating, search) the Mobile and desktop apps have improved a lot, and continue to do so. Today, I do not miss Google Photos.
However, I am lucky that almost all my photos/videos at Google Photos were either uploaded when it was still not counted towards the storage (and that did not change for the previously uploaded media) or made with some older Pixel phone, where photos/videos in high quality were also not counted, i.e. unlimited storage. My current phone is a Pixel 5, which still has this feature, but it's unfortunately the last Pixel phone where they had this, and support of this phone ended September 2023.
I'm not sure what to do when I cannot use this phone anymore. Change my habit to make less photos/videos? Or just self-host. I could maybe also filter the media a bit, but I'm somewhat too lazy to do that, and I hope that some AI could maybe anyway do this automatically for me, and I don't really like to delete things, even if they seem maybe not so great quality right now, but it seems like they still might have some value, and storage is cheap.
If anyone is looking for something similar but "at home", on your own docker or vm, Photoprism and Immich are pretty nice, though both have their issues if using "for free" : Photoprism is awesome and does not require you to change your setup/paths/organisation but it has no non admin accounts (need a 2€/month subscription for that, which is quite cheap still), while Immich is not "stable" as-in it changes and break things regularly between updates (well, it's gotten better lately, but still).
NAS is so damn expensive, I'm still planning on building a PLEX media server myself and using it was way. Those QNAP things pushing 2500 for the 4k transcode things it's like OK at that point I can build something myself that has way more of the features I'd want and have way more customizability.
Yeah, I went with mini PCs myself. Have a Lenovo M720 Tiny and a Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro (they are virtually almost the same). You can change parts, there are ample ports available and you can pretty much run any OS you want. In the Dell you can even put 3 storage drives (1x 2.5" and 2x M2) so perfect for an SSD NAS.
The sensible thing is to separate NAS from transcoding. Use NAS only for storage, and solve your computational needs with a mini PC or even just a RasPi.
This. My 4K 10-bit HDR viewing is served from a Intel Celeron N4505 dual-core processor (2.0 GHz/2.9 GHz) + integrated GPU that is running TrueNAS and a bunch of other services + Jellyfin for the actual media.
The sad thing about seeing new hosted photo services (like what we see when we click into the linked Ente site) is how I think they'll eventually fail the same way Picturelife did [1], or how they'll eventually get acquired, and their services/features nerfed by the whims of their new overlord.
I guess it's a good thing Ente might become a viable self-hosted option in the future. I haven't tried the hosted service, but a metadata export guarantee could be huge in attracting paying users for which this is a concern.
I believe that we can build an incredibly profitable business by serving photos well. SmugMug has proven this. But their audience is Pro while ours is consumers. ARPU and TAM are different for both, but I think the product will favor us (once we are about more than just e2ee).
That said, I understand your concern.
Open-sourcing the server was a step towards ensuring posterity. Pricing ourself sustainably from day #1 was another. We'll have to do a lot more work on this front over the next few decades and eventually find someone aligned with our ethos to pass the baton to.
I find this to be a very interesting problem to work on :)
I don't think this service is End-to-End encrypted the way we would like to think it is. If you can share pictures with friends by just giving them a link to a page, the server app has the encryption keys too.
I think a better term for what is happening here is "client side encryption". That reduces the chances of getting things confused with messaging, which is a different sort of a problem.
This at least has a user accessible cryptographic identity, so end to end secure key exchange is possible. So if you really wanted to call it end to end encrypted, it would be legitimate to do so. I suspect that the motivation here is still mostly marketing driven.
nope, if you put info after `#` on a url, the browser wont share that info with the server. Excalidraw use this technique to allow users to share encrypted data with other users
I gave the webapp and android app a quick test. It looks nice, but it is still not as smooth as google photos or similar. E.g. the photos are not preloaded fully and I still need to wait a few milliseconds to get a photo fully rendered. (Also there is some white flickering when swiping through the photos on android)
I wonder how the big players do it. Of course they have a lot more manpower, but maybe the also have some clever caching/rendering lib..?
Kudos for doing this and opensourcing everything. I really appreciate this and I might stick around.
We currently keep 2 versions of a photo - one the original, and the other a downscaled copy to be rendered as the thumbnail.
Unlike non-e2ee providers, we cannot transcode and serve optimised images on the fly, when it's faster to downscale than serve the original image over network.
What we could do is
1. Intelligently preload original photos when their thumbnails are in scope
2. Store an extra version of the photo, whose resolution is between that of the thumbnail and the original, and perform #1 over those
TIL about progressive JPEGs, will check it out, thanks!
We currently render the thumbnail first (in most cases it's available locally) and then replace it with the original image once fetched from remote, while replicating the zoom and pan operations (if any) performed by the user. So it is "progressive" in some sense, but goes from something like 20% to 100% in one shot.
("20%" is a simplification, the actual value will depend on the resolution of the original image and that of the generated thumbnail, the latter is fixed)
I have been using it for last 1 year. I have been amazed by the fast pace of the development, not many features lacking now compared to Google Photos despite being E2E.
I just tried the free trial (1GB, 1 year, nice and thanks!) and this is pretty impressive software. I like the mobile app: it's snappy, and Just Works. Obviously, I couldn't fully test it because I have many gigabytes of photos on my phone (which is a problem I'm trying to fix!), at least not without going out of the free trial range. Also, uploading all that stuff takes time, and I'm not sure I want to share all that personal stuff with you fine folks, even though you seem to have your house in order.
Which brings us to self-hosting, of course: really nice that the server is open source! I found ente first through f-droid when the app landed there but put it aside because the server was closed-source then. But wow, really nice design! I like the docker-compose just shoves a minio in there, really neat and probably how I would build something like that myself if i would start from scratch.
Compared to photoprism and immich, for sure server-side machine-learning is missing, but then that's obviously a tradeoff you must live with if you want E2EE.
As I mentioned in the goodbye note, I won't be using this short term because I do need to have something on my desktop I sync photos with that's not a bulging pile of Chrome (AKA "electron"). I really appreciate you spent all that energy writing those apps, but I really need something more lightweight on the desktop.
Right now I'm syncing photos with git-annex, and I wonder if ente could be a "special remote" there, even, but for now this is not really compatible with my workflow.
But congrats on this tool, it looks really nice and I'm likely going to recommend this to friends and family as a hosted solution.
I can not overstate how much value your email conveys. It's because of our culture that and users can't communicate with a human. Thank you for valuing human contact at human@ente.io
Seriously, 500 GB is "most users"? I never actually measured how much space my photos take (I put the off the phone onto a NAS), but I would guess it must easily fit under 50 GB, or I should reconsider how I store them. And I don't consider myself as somebody who barely takes photos. Granted, I have no idea how those people who have instagram actually think, but I don't imagine I might need that much of photos to be constantly accessible on my phone (I mean, the point of these apps is to have them actually accessible on demand on your device, right?) For a "professional" 2TB is probably not quite enough as well, but then, why would a "professional" store their photos as JPEGs on a Google Photos alternative? But otherwise, I might dump all my photos from Ente on a drive just in case, but to store in the cloud just actually nice photos, all dups removed. How would I ever exceed 50 GB this way?
So, what's the catch? Is 500 GB photos on Google Drive actually "most users"? Is there something with that service that would prevent me from staying within 50 GB? Like, maybe it's impossible to delete a photo later on? This is a serious question, 500 GB of photos for "most users" seems absolutely nuts to me.
Immich is resource-hungry on the initial import, but should run on very little after that, especially if you make some tweaks like disabling ML and transcoding.
Ok, the reason I asked is that I have been searching for a photos solution myself. I am not sure if it's a god idea to pursue and if there is actually a market for it. If there is, maybe not a bad idea to explore a bit.
On the website Ente mentions the AI features are not yet ready and can not be used on phones yet. Is there an approximate timeframe on when they will be usable (on Desktop & Phone and if possible even shared in a family)? I use the search & face recognition on Google Photos a lot. Once that works on Ente, I‘ll try to switch :-)
I‘m absolutely fine with having the ML run on my Desktop as long as it syncs to the phone as well.
I would love this paired with sharing photos of certain faces in (eg our children with my wife). Perhaps a dynamic album (with a list of faces) that I could then share.
Hey, one of the folks working on Ente here. Our clients were always open source, we published the code to our server[1] into a monorepo[2] just yesterday.
Do said clients have the ability to specify a custom endpoint? Obviously with the clients being open source a rebuild can fix that, but hoping that's not required.
Why is local on device ml a pro when compared to google photos?
Part of the value for photos for me is the fact that they do all the ml work ahead of time on their servers and not my tiny battery powered gadget. I can open it in on any device and search any photo instantly.
I am aware of the why, it's claimed to be e2e. But then it shouldn't be touted as a "pro" when compared to Google Photos which the site's home page is asking me to do. Hence the question.
As for iOS, Apple controls the whole stack. Whatever ML they do, they do it only on devices capable of that level of ML.
I can buy the cheapest android I can find with a 10 year old mediatek processor and search for pictures of my dog and it'll show it. There is a value to doing the heavy things on a heavy hitting server.
We have to pick our battles, and we currently aren't looking at serving customers on low-end devices. But if they access Ente on a laptop, the indexing will run there, and the computed indexes will sync to their low-end devices, e2ee.
Also, given that compute on smart phones is getting better and cheaper with every iteration, we believe it's best to bet on Edge ML for the long term.
Thanks for clarifying; you guys have built something amazing and also made it open source, which you didn't have to. Please don't take my comments as an attack or as demotivating.
I wanted to share my view as a regular person, sadly for whom absolute privacy is a feature and not a necessity, which I think is the vast majority.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Google Photos is not E2E. Explain how you can do ML without having the key. Either you hand them the key or you don’t.
Of course they mention it as an alternative to Google and Apple Photos, but that doesn’t imply that they have 100% of the feature set of each.
We could perhaps reduce the replicas from 3 (2 hot, 1 cold) to 2 (1 hot, 1 cold), and lower our costs, but it's not something we've actively thought about.
Also, our prices are designed such that the business can run sustainably, and we believe that's the best way to build Ente, where the expectation is for the company to outlive its customers.
I was so close to buying this. But dang. Im nearly 300Gb of photos. Thats pretty pricey for me since job security right now isnt great. Man the big guys have this sewn up. Here's wishing you guys the best of luck. I'll keep an eye on it
It has been a while and Ente probably progressed too, but I remember that I looked multiple times at Ente.
However, one feature that I love about PhotoPrism is the performance. I have about 120.000 pictures on my Raspberry Pi and for the most part, the experience is flued (just try opening a picture and hold the right arrow key on your keyboard (just try it in the demo)). I have had local solutions that had problems with that amount of pictures and this one works via network. Other features like face recognition, automatic labels, or the map view are cool too.
Thank you for sharing the demo, it was simple to experience the product. This is a reminder for us to provide one as well :)
Ente now has everything except cross-platform face-recognition (it's desktop only right now), labels and EXIF edits. The first two are being worked on, we should have v1s ready by Q3. Polishing will take a bit longer.
The long-press-to-skim-through albums is very neat, will add this.
Hey, you can use Ente's desktop app[1] to import the archives you export via Google Takeout. The app stitches together metadata with their original files so you'll have your library in one-piece.
Ente verification code email is considered dangerous by Google mail.
"Similar messages were used to steal people's personal information. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information."
We've spend time debugging this and talking to our service provider's[1] support, but haven't been able to figure out the root cause.
If there are any experts reading this, we'd be grateful if you could let us know what we're doing wrong here.
We're in the middle of switching over to SES because they are landing flawlessly into Gmail inboxes, but it would still be good to understand what we could have done better.
Hello Vishnu, Truly sorry that you are facing this trouble and we are here to help. Please do share your Zoho account details and an elaborate description of the issue you are facing here - https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail/contact.html?src=pd-menu. Or you may also write an email to support@zeptomail.com. Rest assured, we will get to the bottom of it and help in resolving the same. Looking forward to your email. - Regards, Zoho Cares.
The problem is your service provider, Zoho. Zoho is used by a massive amount of spammers. As a result, many email blocking and verification services will flag any MX records that lead back to Zoho.
This looks great. I have been using self hosted next cloud for a while and it is pretty slow in loading image thumbnails under a large folder. I am curious about Ente’s performance.
"Edge" unfortunately is a broad term whose definition depends on the scope of the system. But "Edge ML" is the precise way to communicate what we're doing.
I agree that "on device ML" is less ambiguous, so will give this some more thought.
I'm looking forward to trying our the self-hosted option, but I will say the transparency they've provided to their reliability model for hosted is awesome.
Compare this to the approach of CSP's, their model is mostly around "trust me bro", and even on enterprise/commercial terms the transparency they provide is poor. I would love to see this sort of transparency by service providers in the future.
Looks like we've quite a bit of "ASO" work todo. Thanks for the heads up!
Regarding encryption, the link you shared points to Immich. Ente uses client side encryption, so your data is encrypted before it leaves your device, and only you have the keys to decrypt it.
I had ente for about a year. Does what the label says, but then Proton Drive released support for auto backup of pictures and I switched since pay for Proton and have a few terabytes of space with them.
The thing I miss in Proton Drive is being able to move the photos from the sync folder to somewhere else, or otherwise organize them into folders. Not sure if Ente delivers on it, but for now I'm sticking with Proton since I already have a plan that gives me other services. Nice to know about this alternative, though.
I think you would find more success, and ultimately serve your mission better, if you leaned on qualities other than privacy, which consumers unfortunately don't value as much as we might like.
Hey I use this! Thank you for building such good UX with E2EE! Photos are really private to me and I'm paying for the convenience on the cloud. I'm happy with it.
We think the set is disjoint. We aren't hurting our revenue by catering to the tinkerers. They will hopefully help spread the word about Ente, and contribute to making the product better in the long run.
Sorry, we don't support use cases above 6TB right now. This is an arbitrary limitation, it is just that we haven't figured out a sensible price point for larger tiers.
Honestly, everyone can do what they want with their money but working in tech and being on a site like this and seeing this comment makes me really sad
We all want cool things, secure, where our data is protected and we are not the product, but 3 euros a month is too much?
No wonder big tech gets bigger and the rich get richer. The silicon valley VC funded feifdoms become more entrenched and, in the end, we all suffer for it
There are much cheaper alternatives to Ente. Filen.io, which is also E2E encrypted, for example costs 200 GB montly for 1.99 Euro. Its difficult to compete with iCloud if your service costs three times as much.
Filen is perhaps cheaper because they are storing lesser replicas. It is not financially feasible to provide 3 replicas at their price points, unless they're running their own storage infrastructure, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Now Ente could of course choose to keep lesser replicas and offer "lite" plans that are more affordable. But we would rather not complicate our pricing structure right now. Understanding buckets of GBs is hard enough, and adding tiers on top would worsen the experience for most.
All of that said, Filen does seem like a really cool project for storing files.
We had opensourced our server[1] yesterday, which is perhaps why we are on the front page. Stoked to be here
Ente had launched on HN[2] a while ago and has been sustainably growing since.
We took the feedback from our Show HN seriously and have since
- undergone a cryptography audit [3]
- published our replication strategy [4]
- added requested features (family plans, collaborative albums and links, ...) [5][6][7]
- made progress with Edge ML [8][9]
- built a CLI for incremental data exports (our desktop app supports this as well) [10]
- and in general matured as a company [11]
Also, apart from our source code, our Figma[12] is public as well.
If you've feedback on what we could do better, please do share, it'd be very helpful.
And if you've any questions, do ask, I'd love to make myself useful.
[1]: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439
[3]: https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit/
[4]: https://ente.io/reliability
[5]: https://ente.io/blog/family-plans
[6]: https://ente.io/blog/collaborative-albums/
[7]: https://ente.io/blog/collect-photos/
[8]: https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/
[9]: https://ente.io/blog/desktop-ml-beta/
[10]: https://github.com/ente-io/cli
[11]: https://ente.io/blog/reflections-on-trusting-trust/
[12]: https://www.figma.com/file/SYtMyLBs5SAOkTbfMMzhqt/ente-Visua...