Ente is a beautiful, private cloud for your memories, with apps for mobile, desktop and web.
At Ente, we use Local AI to deliver features like face recognition and magic search, while respecting the privacy of your photos.
We’ll now join a cohort of builders pushing technology forward for an AI that is light, private and accessible.
This being self hostable makes me instantly like this. Something like G photos that I could self host and dump a lot of shit off my phone storage would be amazing.
Encryption in self hosted when you’re hosting only your personal data isn’t really a positive feature
For the case of ente, having all the photos in encrypted blobs in a minio container, means you have to export the content every night using their cli tool, verify it, repeat for every family member, then backup the result
People really underestimate the value of stability and predictability.
There are some amazing FOSS projects out there ran by folks who don’t give a crap about stability or the art of user experience. It holds them back, and unfortunately helps drive a fragmented ecosystem where we get 2,3,5 major projects all trying to do the same thing.
Every time an open-source cloud gallery like Ente or PhotoPrism is mentioned, someone is sure to come along and talk about Immich.
I mean, Immich is cool, yeah, but it definetly is not a gold standard or something. Ente is a much more finished product.
I’m not sure why every time I look at this project, it rubs me the wrong way. Anyone found anything wrong with it?
I just hate the comic style that is used in presentations like this, it is just too cutsey, and I can’t take it seriously
What does Ente mean?
In Malayalam, Vishnu’s native language, “ente” means “mine”. Thus “Ente Photos” has the literal meaning “my photos”.
This was a good name, but still Vishnu looked around for better ones. But one day, he discovered that “ente” means “duck” in German. This unexpected connection sealed the deal. We should ask him why he likes ducks so much, but apparently he does, so this dual meaning (“mine” / “duck”) led him to finalize the name, and also led to the adoption of “Ducky”, Ente’s mascot Source
Been using it for a while, works well
Ente supports all files that have a mime type of image/* or video/* regardless of their specific format.
so it handles raw images too?
Since it’s end to end encrypted, Ente just sees some raw bytes, it has no way to tell if what you uploaded is an image or not. So in practice it supports whatever the client can display, so your browser for the web version.
