[HN Gopher] Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alte...
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Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative
Author : madmax108
Score : 663 points
Date : 2024-03-02 07:31 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ente.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ente.io)
| franky47 wrote:
| 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).
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| Hey Franky47, glad to see our latest discussion still on-going
| on the edge semantics!
| philips wrote:
| https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Great now I just need Google's export/data migration feature to
| actually work.
| roozbeh18 wrote:
| use google takeout.
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| I'd guess that the emphasis in OP's reply was on 'actually
| work'.
| akkartik wrote:
| In case it's useful, here's the solution that worked for me
| the last time I tried it:
|
| 1. Takeout to Google Drive :grimace:
|
| 2. rclone from Google Drive
|
| But I do this around once a year, and the last few times
| there are new roadblocks every time.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://ente.io/download/desktop
| Aeolun wrote:
| Interesting I'd never even heard of this before. I was fairly
| certain I'd seen all the common open source solutions, but
| apparently not.
| infogulch wrote:
| It seems to have been open sourced very recently.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
| jpeeler wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Not yet, there's a discussion about this @
| https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
| manmal wrote:
| I'd be interested in reports from people who have used or are
| using Ente for self-hosting.
| infogulch wrote:
| There's a note on the server readme about self hosting:
|
| https://github.com/ente-io/ente/tree/main/server#self-hostin...
| arendtio wrote:
| I tried Ente a while ago but decided I liked a self-hosted
| Photoprism instance better.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, are there any specific features in Photoprism that you
| liked better?
| arendtio wrote:
| 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.
|
| Photoprism has a feature list [1] and a demo [2].
|
| [1]: https://www.photoprism.app/features
|
| [2]: https://try.photoprism.app/
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
| david_p wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I currently use photoprism, which is good, but i'm always on
| the look for a great self-hosted photo app.
| manmal wrote:
| I'm using Immich and it's quite decent. The native app has
| some annoying glitches.
| DirkH wrote:
| The AI in photoprism was too embarrassing that I gave up on
| it. How did you get it working properly?
| jacques-noris wrote:
| I'm looking exactly for something like that. But 2.99 Euro a
| month is too expensive, when even Apple only wants 99 cents.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Apple's cloud probably gets a better deal on their datacenter's
| costs and already charged you through your device and app store
| tax.
| davidodio wrote:
| 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
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Over a 10 year horizon, the difference between 1EUR/m and
| 3EUR/m is a mere 240EUR.
|
| That's like 2-5 extra work hours over the course of 10 years!
|
| I seriously don't get how someone working in tech would fear
| bankruptcy over this.
| jacques-noris wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, one of the reasons Ente is expensive is because we
| maintain 3 copies of your data across 3 clouds.
|
| You can read about our replication strategy here:
| https://ente.io/reliability
|
| We could in the future offer cheaper plans at the cost of
| additional replicas.
| bovem wrote:
| The UI looks great. Couldn't find any info about self hosting but
| I did find a feature request in GitHub Issues [1].
|
| I guess I'll stick with Immich [2] for now.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ente-io/ente/issues/141 [2]
| https://immich.app/ [3]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/116fx9v/ama_im_vi...
| mavamaarten wrote:
| 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| f3d46600-b66e wrote:
| 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.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| does it, by any chance, do search by any keywords and
| grouping the same face together, like Google Photos?
| darkwater wrote:
| Yes, it does. You can also search for terms like "pizza" or
| "beach with palms"
| BodyCulture wrote:
| Manual action is needed for an update? Why not let the
| computer do this instead?
| js4ever wrote:
| I can confirm there is a breaking change literally every
| single week, check here: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/discussions/7405#discus...
|
| It's a great software but I would not recommend it at all
| because of this and the answer from the authors about the
| issue
| Jnr wrote:
| 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.
| f3d46600-b66e wrote:
| 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...)
| sanex wrote:
| 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.
| raudette wrote:
| This one got me too - check out: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/issues/5907
|
| Running REINDEX TABLE USERS; on the DB solved the issue for
| me.
|
| Immich is definitely fast moving - it is awesome, but has
| been a challenge to keep it current.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Yeah I think immich recommends keeping a separate archive
| for anything you care about.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I keep seeing immich mentioned a lot in selfhosting
| community. Is there a mobile app that can connect to the
| selfhosted backend server?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| yes. And even an Android TV app in dev, too.
|
| 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
|
| Though I still back up to Google Photos as well
| judiisis wrote:
| They today open sourced their server which can now be
| selfhosted https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server/
| pants2 wrote:
| 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.
| semiquaver wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| This is currently only supported via build flags.
|
| Addition of an option in-app is being discussed @
| https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
| moelf wrote:
| come here to say Immich is absolutely great, the advanced
| search that landed recently is a game changer combined with
| semantic search: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/releases/tag/v1.96.0
| bobek wrote:
| Uh, never came across them. Though Immich and damselfly were the
| only really usable.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| For self-hosting, there's Photoprism[1] as well.
|
| Ente's strength lies in end-to-end encryption[2] and its
| cloud[3] offering so you don't have to worry about reliability.
|
| So if self-hosting is what you're after, Immich, Photoprism and
| Damselfly (TIL!) are perhaps better designed to serve your
| needs.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
|
| [2]: https://ente.io/architecture
|
| [3]: https://ente.io/reliability
| Jack5500 wrote:
| This looks great and the self hosting instructions are fine too.
| But I think the Apps don't support using your own server yet,
| right?
| Maledictus wrote:
| Do you have a link to the self hosting instructions?
|
| edit: found it: https://github.com/ente-
| io/ente/tree/main/server#self-hostin...
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, not yet.
|
| Currently you've to pass build time flags[1] to modify the
| endpoint.
|
| Providing an option in-app to change the endpoint is under
| discussion[2].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ente-
| io/ente/blob/main/server/RUNNING.md#...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| I want a self hosted photo backup service for family that doesn't
| need 4gb ram.
|
| I do not need heavy transcoding or stuff. Just a place for people
| to dump their photos on.
|
| I have looked at some alternatives but they are all resource
| hungry from respective docs.
|
| If pixelfed can run on php and limited resources , why not some
| google photos alternative?
|
| Is there something lightweight that let's multiple people to
| share their photos together.
|
| I have attempted to use pixelfed but that's stupid as it only
| let's 4 photos per post. Urrgh.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Syncthing? I just have my photos folder synced to my NAS.
| izacus wrote:
| Grab a Synology NAS and run their Synology Photos software? It
| has almost all the features of Google Photos, self hosted and
| very little maintenance.
| eklavya wrote:
| What exactly would you want? Would you be willing to pay for
| it? How much?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Set up a software on a vps that uses s3 backend.
|
| People would upload, backup, share their photos and media.
|
| Its not in a single place so I can't use local sync and
| stuff.
| eklavya wrote:
| 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.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| 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.
|
| (disclosure, I'm one of the Immich maintainers)
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Uh... Will it be fine on a 1 GB ram 1 vcpu for basic stuff? I
| won't do a fat import, but one by one and staggered.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Most lightweight one I've found so far:
| https://photoview.github.io/
| SillyUsername wrote:
| End to end encrypted AND encrypted at rest? Otherwise all the
| staff can see your photos too...
| shawnz wrote:
| End to end encrypted implies encrypted at rest. Maybe you're
| thinking they meant "encrypted in transit"?
| SillyUsername wrote:
| I did, thanks.
| lojewalo wrote:
| It appears so (using libsodium primitives):
| https://ente.io/architecture/
| robertwt7 wrote:
| 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
| flakeoil wrote:
| > 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.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Plus time spent upgrading, every so often.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| Hard drives last even less, what is even your point? I
| don't understand. Do you suggest they store their photos
| on magnetic tape or what?
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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).
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| How often do you move or delete your backed up photos?
| diggan wrote:
| Or add to your collection. Depends on how many people you
| are who use the same NAS and how many photos you take.
|
| Sure, if you upload 10 photos a week and never do any
| other reads, go with a SSD for all I care, it'll last
| long enough.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| If you don't move or delete old photos, all new photos
| will be written to a new cell. The writes add up for
| cells, not for the whole SSD...
| meatmanek wrote:
| Modern SSD controllers should be doing wear-leveling such
| that you don't need to worry about this.
| darkwater wrote:
| > A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one,
| about ten years, as far as I know.
|
| Solution: a RAID system with 5 reliable disks and you
| replace 2 of them every 5th year, and the other 3 in the
| following 4 years.
| vitus wrote:
| This works great, until you have coordinated failures,
| e.g. due to a firmware bug that's dependent on the uptime
| of the disk
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243).
|
| 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).
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
| vitus wrote:
| 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.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| You expect this to be cheaper and/or easier than cloud
| hosting?
| mderazon wrote:
| My bigger risk is fire/theft/flood. If data is only stored
| at my house
| sen wrote:
| 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.
| deanc wrote:
| Sales. This must be an American thing. Have never seen any
| decent discounts on them here in Europe.
| brnt wrote:
| In the Netherlands we have them all the time too. Also on
| Synologys.
| deanc wrote:
| Don't think I've ever seen Synology on sale in Finland in
| the last 15 years. I have been looking fairly regularly
| on amazon.de too.
| huijzer wrote:
| > 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.
| joking wrote:
| 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.
| schnatterer wrote:
| 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _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.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| 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..
| soziawa wrote:
| > There are so many alternatives to Apple Photos, all with this
| handicap.
|
| Apple doesn't allow background execution for third party apps.
| Can't increase service revenue if you allow competition.
| qweqwe14 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ish-
| app/ish/issues/249#issuecomment-54433...
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| qweqwe14 wrote:
| 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"
| stavros wrote:
| 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".
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| 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.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Apple is the reason.
|
| They make it impossible to compete, their apps have permissions
| no one else can have.
| sofixa wrote:
| The EU is working on forcing their hand there via the Digital
| Services and Markets Acts.
| mnvrth wrote:
| 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.
| afro88 wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, Ente's CEO here.
|
| 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...
| bo0tzz wrote:
| This is awesome to see, congratulations from the Immich team on
| building an amazing app!
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thank you! We're fans of Immich!
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Question:
|
| Do you backup changed photos in iOS?
|
| How do you backup a slow motion video on iOS? Synology
| exports, meaning your 240fps video becomes a 30fps video.
|
| Immich retains the 240fps.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Yes, we do backup updated photos.
|
| 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!
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Oh no. If you keep the 240fps video, that is what a
| backup is. Which is what I want.
|
| How it's played is not a concern of the backup tool. It
| is a concern of the player.
|
| Synology exports. So I record something at 240fps, and
| then the file uploaded is 30fps. That's not a backup.
|
| It's like when you backup a photoshop PSD. You want a
| backup of the PSD, not a flattened PNG.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| To double check, I just recorded a slow-motion video,
| downloaded it from Ente to my desktop, ran `ffmpeg -i
| FILE.MOV`, and the stream info says:
|
| ```
|
| Stream #0:0[0x1](und): Video: hevc (Main) (hvc1 /
| 0x31637668), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, 78644 kb/s,
| 239.70 fps, 240 tbr, 2400 tbn (default)
|
| ```
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Yea. That's correct.
|
| I think it would be cool for the player to recognize a
| 240fps video and allow it to play slow mo. But again,
| that's a client responsibly.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I realize it's very hard, but can we maybe reconsider opening
| the encryption-at-rest feature request?
| https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/450
|
| Maybe we can give temporary access to processing steps in the
| pipeline, then have Immich forget the keys after it does the
| processing?
| keerthiko wrote:
| Tangential, is this intended to be pronounced like "enrre",
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I've scribbled a bit about the story behind the name and the
| mascot here: https://ente.io/blog/ducky/
| miramba wrote:
| Interesting story! How did you check for trademarks, is
| there a search engine?
| random_ind_dude wrote:
| enrre.ayyoo to be exact. :D (enrre means mine, and ayyoo is a
| word used to express surprise). I remember the Show HN and
| I'm glad to see them grow.
| aptwebapps wrote:
| deva.me being already taken, I guess.
| vvanpo wrote:
| Quick note: your website front page currently says
|
| > Our open source code has been audited by reputed
| cryptographers.
|
| I think you probably mean "reputable", as "reputed" inspires a
| lot less confidence.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Fixed, thank you for pointing this out!
| kosolam wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Google Takeout downloads the images in full quality.
|
| But it splits your metadata (like capture time, geo
| coordinates) and places them in a separate sidecar file.
|
| This isn't an issue if you're migrating to Ente because
| during import the desktop app[1] will merge the metadata with
| their respective files.
|
| If it's for you to keep a local copy, you will unfortunately
| need to write some scripts. There's in fact a paid product[2]
| that does just this.
|
| [1]: https://ente.io/download/desktop
|
| [2]: https://metadatafixer.com/
| kosolam wrote:
| That's good to hear. Do you forsee the 2tb plan getting
| cheaper in the future?
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Not unless our existing providers provide a volume
| discount, or we start managing some of the infrastructure
| (1/3 replicas) ourselves.
|
| The latter is very likely in the long run.
| kosolam wrote:
| 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?
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Friends and founders ("angels"), no VC.
| anneessens wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Not right now, sorry!
|
| There's this tool that can fix capture times:
| https://github.com/mattwilson1024/google-photos-exif
|
| There are perhaps more that I'm unaware of.
| anneessens wrote:
| I'll check out this, thanks!
| hruzgar wrote:
| 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.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Takeout is malicious compliance.
|
| 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].
|
| [1]: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/
| acceptab...
|
| [2]: https://dtinit.org
| marwis wrote:
| 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _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?
| marwis wrote:
| 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.
| anneessens wrote:
| I have the exact same metadata issue after exporting from
| Google Photos. Would you mind to share which tools you used
| to fix it?
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| _sorry for the eye sore, if someone can split the bullet points
| into multiple lines, please do, I 'm unable to edit my comment_
| aarjithn wrote:
| 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!
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words, will forward them :)
| throwaway44lk wrote:
| Why do you have to say this? Why say mallu instead of saying
| a fellow Indian?
| rdedev wrote:
| Cause both of them are from the state of Kerala?
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| I don't think it's malicious. It's just mallucious :)
| raj2569 wrote:
| Congratulations!!
|
| Always good to see some one from this side making to the front
| page of HN!!
| raj2569 wrote:
| Do you have an import from smugmug? I have been a smugmug user
| for about 19 years and finally thinking of moving on...
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://ente.io/download/desktop
| derefr wrote:
| 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.)
| ENadyr wrote:
| 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?
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| The server was open sourced just yesterday, wasn't planning
| to show HN this soon, but here we are :)
|
| We've a discussion to add an option in-app to configure the
| endpoint @ https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
| ENadyr wrote:
| 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!
| ycombinete wrote:
| Unrelated but there's a retired Warcraft 3 pro called Ente:
|
| https://liquipedia.net/warcraft/EnTe
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| e12e wrote:
| This looks great - thank you so much for opening up the server
| too!
|
| About auth, I'm not sure the claim in the readme is entirely
| correct:
|
| > Two years ago, while building Ente Photos, we realized that
| there was no open source end-to-end encrypted authenticator
| app.
|
| Surely bitwarden existed and had 2fa support two years ago?
| Granted it's not _only_ an authenticator app...
|
| Ed:[I guess 2fa is/was a pay-only feature, so only source-
| available? ]
|
| Looks like auth is a great dedicated 2fa app by the way,
| surprised I've not come across it before.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| The primary issue with Bitwarden is that your passwords and
| 2FA tokens are stored at the same place, essentially
| nullifying the second factor.
|
| Also, the feature to store 2FA tokens is only available on
| Bitwarden's paid plan, while with Ente it's free.
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Uses libsodium, so it can't be bad :)
|
| Cool app, even better now that the server code is open source !
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thank you Frank! We really wouldn't be here without you!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Thank you! I've wanted this for so long. Now that I have it,
| I'd rather spend money on keeping your company around!
| Daviey wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://ente.io/reliability/
|
| 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.
| hum3hum3 wrote:
| I have just been working with photoprism. Ente looks nice but
| going to stay with photoprism as I like the go binary and can
| build features I want.
| pierrelf wrote:
| How does this compare to Nextcloud photos? Looking forward to
| running this at home in the future :)
| daeros wrote:
| 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.
| notum wrote:
| Buy a Mac Mini (older generations work well) for the actual
| transcoding, and use NAS as a, well, NAS.
| haunter wrote:
| 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.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Pretty sure the Intel NUCS(now manufactured by ASUS)/other mini
| PCs with Intel chips can do 4k transcodes easy.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
|
| Works perfectly fine.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| NAS's aren't expensive, 4K@10bit is.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Price is too high
| terseryedu wrote:
| I typically self-host but I'm happy to outsource if the service
| is end-to-end encrypted and has no lock-in.
|
| Now that Ente has open source server, and incremental backup, I'm
| in!
|
| etesync is the other service I'm happy to pay for.
| therealmarv wrote:
| 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!
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| oooh this is interesting - I'd like to self host this...
| ffpip wrote:
| It is e2ee, so using their server would be the same (unless
| you are hosting just cuz you want to :) )
| therealmarv wrote:
| probably better to look into this project?
| https://github.com/Bubka/2FAuth
| physicles wrote:
| 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.
| archon810 wrote:
| There's no landing page to describe what the heck I'm signing
| up for. This company makes some weird UX decisions.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| Hm, maybe I make too much photos/videos, but my current
| collection already has more than 2TB, and 20$/month/2TB seems a
| bit too high.
|
| Btw, in contrast, Google has 100$/year/2TB, so a bit less.
| (https://one.google.com/about/plans)
|
| 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.
| melicerte wrote:
| 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."
|
| So you know
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail
| acejam wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thanks for the information. This is sad if true. In my
| limited experience Zoho been an honest business to deal
| with.
| Faizan711 wrote:
| Isn't the pricing a bit on the upper side, It could have been
| lower like similar to google one
| teekert wrote:
| You mean where part is paid for with your data? ;) (sorry low
| hanging fruit)
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Google has ways to monetize your data. If I were them, I would
| be attaching a price tag to cloud storage simply to not seem
| suspicious :)
|
| Most of our costs come from keeping 3 replicas of your data:
| https://ente.io/reliability
|
| 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.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| 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.
| lakpan wrote:
| You plug your phone in at night, so it probably has 7 hours a
| day to do that work.
|
| iOS does the same. They cannot do it on the server because they
| don't have access to them.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, one of the folks building Ente here.
|
| 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.
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| 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.
|
| Good luck; hope you guys figure this out.
|
| A fellow Malayali :)
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Comments were taken in the best of spirits :)
|
| We do get your perspective. Privacy does not outweigh
| convenience for vast majority. We are hoping to find the
| balance.
| lakpan wrote:
| > when compared to Google Photos
|
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| icar wrote:
| The link contains the needed keys. It's explained in their FAQ.
| thisgoodlife wrote:
| If the link contains the keys, does that mean the server can
| also see these keys?
| jeltz wrote:
| Nope, the secret is in the url fragment. Of course this
| means you need to trust that they do not change the JS code
| so that it steaks your keys.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, details on how we're providing E2EE with links has been
| documented here: https://ente.io/blog/building-shareable-links/
|
| Some bits of the blog post are outdated, since the feature has
| matured since then. But the implementation details are roughly
| the same.
|
| TL;DR: The keys are added to the URL fragment (the part that
| follows the #), and these fragments are not accessible to the
| server.
| upofadown wrote:
| 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.
| stockhorn wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Thanks for checking us out!
|
| 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
|
| Sorry about the flicker, will fix it.
| tjoff wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Hey, we do support the use cases you mentioned!
|
| 1. Album collaboration: https://ente.io/blog/collaborative-
| albums/
|
| 2. Photo collection: https://ente.io/blog/collect-photos/
|
| Please let me know if I missed something. Sharing is an
| important feature for all of us, and we would love to get it
| right.
| tjoff wrote:
| That is great :) I will look into it, from a first glance
| collaboration seems to only be on a per album basis? Can you
| have nested albums?
|
| For a group of friends / family you'd probably want many tens
| of albums tracking different trips/events etc.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| We don't support nested albums, yet.
|
| Thanks for sharing your use case, will figure out how to
| best solve for it.
|
| (Right now a "stream" of photos within a feed sounds like
| simpler UX than nested-albums, but will think more)
| quicon wrote:
| 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.
| eurekin wrote:
| Does it handle iPhone hdr photos?
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I don't really get the business model. An open source stack makes
| sense for products targeted towards programmers.
|
| Out of curiosity I checked Dropbox:
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/plans/storage
|
| 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
|
| EDIT: There is a comparison: https://ente.io/compare/ente-vs-
| dropbox/
|
| 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
| sofixa wrote:
| > Most people that back up their pics in ~the cloud~ won't have
| the technical skills to do self-host
|
| And that's probably better for them, because it's much easier
| to lose data from your own NAS than it is for a cloud storage
| provider to do so.
| Sayrus wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/21/23315513/google-photos-
| cs...
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| lewiscollard wrote:
| > 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.
| j1nd4L wrote:
| 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.
|
| Kudos on the Ente team!!
| pppoe wrote:
| 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.
| pard68 wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| sagz wrote:
| Hi, your plans are capped at 2TB ($200/yr). Any chance to get
| higher tiers? Looking for 15tb...
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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.
| ValentineC wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/22/12587656/picturelife-
| shut...
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| 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 :)
| EchoReflection wrote:
| i have been using Ente for a few years now and totally
| love/recommend it
| firstrowraver wrote:
| Registration does not work with Hide My Email (input fields stay
| empty)
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| That's odd, thanks for the report, will look into this!
| whatscooking wrote:
| Prices are way too high compared to competitors
| rishikeshs wrote:
| Does the name signify 'Ente'/'enrre' - my in Malayalam language?
| devaiops9001 wrote:
| https://Syncthing.net
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| 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
| fifafu wrote:
| 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.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Semantic search is ready. Face recognition should be ready by
| Q3 2024.
| fifafu wrote:
| great, thank you!
| f3d46600-b66e wrote:
| How does it compare to immich?
| willwade wrote:
| 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
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