Hey, Ente's CEO here.<p>We had opensourced our server[1] yesterday, which is perhaps why we are on the front page. Stoked to be here<p>Ente had launched on HN[2] a while ago and has been sustainably growing since.<p>We took the feedback from our Show HN seriously and have since<p>- undergone a cryptography audit [3]<p>- published our replication strategy [4]<p>- added requested features (family plans, collaborative albums and links, ...) [5][6][7]<p>- made progress with Edge ML [8][9]<p>- built a CLI for incremental data exports (our desktop app supports this as well) [10]<p>- and in general matured as a company [11]<p>Also, apart from our source code, our Figma[12] is public as well.<p>If you've feedback on what we could do better, please do share, it'd be very helpful.<p>And if you've any questions, do ask, I'd love to make myself useful.<p>[1]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit/</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://ente.io/reliability" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/reliability</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/family-plans" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/family-plans</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/collaborative-albums/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/collaborative-albums/</a><p>[7]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/collect-photos/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/collect-photos/</a><p>[8]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/</a><p>[9]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/desktop-ml-beta/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/desktop-ml-beta/</a><p>[10]: <a href="https://github.com/ente-io/cli">https://github.com/ente-io/cli</a><p>[11]: <a href="https://ente.io/blog/reflections-on-trusting-trust/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/blog/reflections-on-trusting-trust/</a><p>[12]: <a href="https://www.figma.com/file/SYtMyLBs5SAOkTbfMMzhqt/ente-Visual-Design" rel="nofollow">https://www.figma.com/file/SYtMyLBs5SAOkTbfMMzhqt/ente-Visua...</a>
The UI looks great. Couldn't find any info about self hosting but I did find a feature request in GitHub Issues [1].<p>I guess I'll stick with Immich [2] for now.<p>Edit: Found a Reddit AMA [3] from the CEO and I'm happy to know that self hosting is a goal in the long run.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/ente-io/ente/issues/141">https://github.com/ente-io/ente/issues/141</a>
[2] <a href="https://immich.app/" rel="nofollow">https://immich.app/</a>
[3] <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/116fx9v/ama_im_vishnu_ceo_of_enteio_e2ee_alternative_to/j96yu1p/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/116fx9v/ama_im_vi...</a>
Ente Auth <a href="https://auth.ente.io/" rel="nofollow">https://auth.ente.io/</a> 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).<p>I've exported from a rooted phone from Authy->Aegis->Ente Auth.<p>I have no need for their main product but they are building amazing software!
I don't really get the business model. An open source stack makes sense for products targeted towards programmers.<p>Out of curiosity I checked Dropbox:<p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/plans/storage" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/plans/storage</a><p>9 USD per month gives you 2TB storage (vs. 500GB here)<p>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.<p>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<p>EDIT: There is a comparison: <a href="https://ente.io/compare/ente-vs-dropbox/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/compare/ente-vs-dropbox/</a><p>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
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”<p>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..
New to me, looks nice. But I'm a bit perplexed by the lack of functionality regarding group access.<p>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.<p>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.<p>From the site: "<i>Sync your library with your partner, and even designate them as an heir to your account.</i>" Nice, but not exactly it.<p>> "<i>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.</i>"<p>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
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.
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.
Hm, maybe I make too much photos/videos, but my current collection already has more than 2TB, and 20$/month/2TB seems a bit too high.<p>Btw, in contrast, Google has 100$/year/2TB, so a bit less. (<a href="https://one.google.com/about/plans" rel="nofollow">https://one.google.com/about/plans</a>)<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/22/12587656/picturelife-shutdown-streamnation-jonathan-benassaya" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/22/12587656/picturelife-shut...</a>
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 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)<p>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..?<p>Kudos for doing this and opensourcing everything. I really appreciate this and I might stick around.
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.<p>Kudos on the Ente team!!
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 <i>many</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Compared to photoprism and immich, for sure server-side machine-learning is missing, but then that's obviously a tradeoff you <i>must</i> live with if you want E2EE.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>easily</i> 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?<p>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.
I want a self hosted photo backup service for family that doesn't need 4gb ram.<p>I do not need heavy transcoding or stuff. Just a place for people to dump their photos on.<p>I have looked at some alternatives but they are all resource hungry from respective docs.<p>If pixelfed can run on php and limited resources , why not some google photos alternative?<p>Is there something lightweight that let's multiple people to share their photos together.<p>I have attempted to use pixelfed but that's stupid as it only let's 4 photos per post. Urrgh.
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 :-)<p>I‘m absolutely fine with having the ML run on my Desktop as long as it syncs to the phone as well.
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 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
Ente verification code email is considered dangerous by Google mail.<p>"Similar messages were used to steal people's personal information. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information."<p>So you know
I typically self-host but I'm happy to outsource if the service is end-to-end encrypted and has no lock-in.<p>Now that Ente has open source server, and incremental backup, I'm in!<p>etesync is the other service I'm happy to pay for.
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.
> Now to run algorithms over your photos, all the computation must be done on the edge.<p>Edge is an overloaded and fuzzy term [0]. It just means "on device" here, right?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/glossary/what-is-edge-computing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/glossary/what...</a>
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.<p><a href="https://ente.io/reliability/" rel="nofollow">https://ente.io/reliability/</a><p>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.
Too bad that ente.io app is not available on Apple App Store.<p>Yeah, searched "ente.io": *cricket*<p>Also no encryption-at-rest capability: <a href="https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/450">https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/450</a>
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.
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.