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.
So… like Immich?
But with fewer breaking changes.
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.
I wanted to like immich, but it felt like everytime I opened it there was a little box saying there was a new version available. Which would be fine except for when that new version wasn’t compatible with the server version I was running, and upgrading that frequently needed changes to my compose file because they changed some option or library or something.
I just want something that can store pictures of my family without a lot of tinkering.
The issue here is that these are solvable problems, release compat isn’t a new problem. It’s just a problem that takes dedicated effort to solve for, just like any other feature.
This is something FOSS apps tend to lack simply due to the nature of how contributions tend to work for free software. Which is an unfortunate reality, but a reality none the less.
In their defense, they also clearly label immich as under active development with frequent changes and bugs.
Edit: nvm I saw it was already discussed in another reply.
Immich is quite new clearly say they will have breaking changes.
Stable release planned for this year
The updates are almost always packed with cool new features so I’d rather have an amazing app with a bit of maintenance then get something stable that lacks features. Especially when stability is now just around the corner.
As far as breaking changes go, in the year of me using the docker install I’ve had maybe 3 updates that required me to change things and each one was leas than 10 mins of work. Pretty basic stuff if you are actually on the selfhosted path. Most people complaining seem to like auto updating apps automatically which seems crazy. I update when I have time to mess around, otherwise it just chugs along super stable.
I didn’t really mention immich directly here.
This is a problem which is endemic to casual software development like many FOSS projects. It’s a reality of how free software tends to be built in general vs commercial software.
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.
Standard*
Oops, a typo. Thanks.
No problem!
Yes, except it’s encrypted and funded by an actual business.
funded by an actual business.
You’re talking like that’s a good thing?
Pros and cons, for sure. Companies like Proton (Mail) and Steam are proof that you can have your cake and eat it too. It’s mostly publicly-funded corporations that are rotten. You can also rest assured that they will not abandon the project because they get bored.
Ente also provides Ente Auth for free, which is an excellent TOTP authenticator.
Protons not a very good example bud
Why?
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Ok elaborate
Immich is funded by FUTO btw
If my instance of immich no longer works, I still have my files.
If an encrypted database of blobs crashes, I hope I can recover it.
When I’m self hosting, I know my preference.
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
I wasn’t trying to make an argument either way. Just stating facts…
Me too, just saying that encryption isn’t always a pro
No, like a duck.
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.
I use Immich. It does what you described as well.
Check out immich, I use that self hosted and it’s exactly like Google photos. It even has optional facial recognition.
Technical question, if it’s e2ee, it means videos can’t be transcoded? Modern smartphones encode video at a bitrate that doesn’t allow real time streaming on 4g
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.
Ohhh that makes more sense, thank you
Considering you can assign any IME to any file, that means technically it supports everything from plain text to proprietary binary data.
So Ente, like duck?
Edit: just checked it out (yes it’s duck), what’s the appeal over a self hosted nextcloud?
This is a photo gallery that can replace Google photos, while using nextcloud as a photo gallery is a proof of concept that can’t be even considered alpha quality
Hang on there. Yes, NextCloud photos is kinda a dump, not gonna lie. Do not like.
But Nextcloud Memories is a labor of love, and it’s been freaking AWESOME. A little bit of Docker knowhow and the NextCloud AiO image is a great combo.
I tried nextcloud photos for ten minutes and it looked like you can add photos to an album only at the moment of their creation. And you need to choose them one by one, don’t have “select all”. And you can’t select photos already uploaded in the past. What? Couldn’t think of a worse gallery than this.
Yeah I honestly agree. Memories is a vast improvement, so much so that it should just be the default at this point. I went so far as to get a menu customizer addon to just remove Nextcloud Photos as an option. I feel like it puts off new users more then helps anything.
I’m glad there’s other options like the OP link, but I seriously enjoy Memories / Nextcloud for hosting it on my own hardware. Very little maintenance, has an app. Uploads from my phone whenever I plug it in to charge. Basically more than enough feature parity with Google photos that I could finally dump that mess. :)
This can also be self hosted and is a much better photo gallery than nextcloud.
How does it compare with Immich?
I personally like that it needs less babysitting.
Between myself, my wife, and my kids there are 6 client devices. And I like not having to deal with the incompatible cross-version issues that I kept running into with just one client device on immich.
It doesn’t have the same ML search that immich has, but they’re adding faces, and I’ve been able to get by with date and location while that kind of stuff is added.
And while I haven’t used it yet, I appreciate that they have an easy, readily available “export” function if you decide to switch to a different image gallery
It would be really nice if I could have it sync to both. I’d like to sync it locally and have all the features available, but for convenience I would also like the option of a secure, reputable cloud service that costs a reasonable fee.
They seem good. However, using the app seems to be either/or (local or their service)
They’re also twice the price of Google, which is a bit tough to swallow.
Technically I think you can use any S3 compatible storage.
I was looking at running a garage instance on a Zimaboard at my parents’ house, but didn’t bother to follow through.
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Well ente means “mine”
Nobody ever talking about lychee ?
Yes okay it’s not GPL or written in a fancy new language (PHP is still alive xD). But it’s simple, elegant, no UX bloat, no ML or IA stuff… Just a plain simple self-hosted photo manager.
One thing I really liked about it, you can import you external photo’s with .xmp files, just one checkbox away.
The tag feature is simple but working as expected. Nothing fancy but it does best what’s it’s supposed to do !!
Call me old boomer but I really like the simplicity of lychee. It’s a bit like how reading an article from miniflux or wallabag… Simple html files without bloating your eyes or your brain…
Just my 2c, nothing to see here !
The selfhosted photo management boom happened when Google announced paid plans for Google Photos. That’s why there are lots of alternatives aiming at replicating every feature.
In my case, I don’t want to manually tag anything. I want a FOSS Google Photos. Nothing more, nothing else. If Immich was orosuction ready I would have akready switched. I haven’t read much about Ente, but I have no interest in the rest because they lack some key feature I really appreciate.
I’m not sure why every time I look at this project, it rubs me the wrong way. Anyone found anything wrong with it?
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Any guesses why that is?
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
I want more ducks
It’s named “duck,” what do you expect?
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
I was thinking why it sounded too convenient lol, i did not know the founder was a malayali. Now it makes sense. I hope they go on to be like proton
So, this question comes from someone with no background in development or marketing but, wouldn’t this money be better spent on develoment or marketing of Firefox. I’m a little more worried about having a long term alternative to Chrome based browsers than self hosting photos. This is not a knock on Ente or any other photo hosting script, I am very interested in a fully functional self hosted Google photos alternative, but my priorities start with Firefox.
