Ente Release Notes

Locker can now scan paper documents. Point the camera at a page, and Locker turns it into a PDF and saves it, all inside the app.

We built Locker as a safe place for the information that matters. Medical records. Identity cards. Insurance papers. Notes and passwords your family may depend on.

A lot of that information starts on paper. The birth certificate. The signed lease. The prescription from this morning. A vault for important documents needs a way to take in paper.

Until now, getting paper into Locker was a chore. You had to use a different scanner app, scan the pages, and export a PDF. Then you switch to Locker and upload it. Two apps for one document.

Scanning a paper document with Ente Locker, from capture to saved PDF

Scan, review, save

There is now a scan button on the Locker home screen. Tap it and the camera opens.

Locker finds the page for you. Hold the phone over the document and the edges light up. Keep it steady for a moment and Locker takes the shot on its own. No shutter button to hunt for. Flip the page and it captures the next one.

When you are done, you review the pages. Once you approve, Locker turns them into a single PDF and saves it into the collection you choose. You never leave the app.

Everything happens on your phone. The page detection runs on the device, and the PDF is encrypted before it goes anywhere. It is the same promise as the rest of Locker. We cannot read your documents. …

In my last post, I wrote about what we were building next: better sharing with family, faster machine learning on your device, and deeper integration with Android. A month later, most of it has shipped, along with a few things that weren't on the list.

This is one of the fullest releases we've put out. Here's what's new.

Library sharing

Library sharing on Ente PhotosUntil now, sharing with family required sharing albums one at a time. Every new trip, and every new album, you had to deal with another round of "did you add me?".

You can now share your entire library with a family member. Head to Settings → Family, pick a member, and tap Share albums. Everything you have is shared, and every album you create from here on is shared automatically.

Hidden albums stay hidden, because some things are yours alone :)

Album slideshows

Album slideshows on Ente PhotosPick one album, or a few, and play them as a slideshow. You can set how long each photo stays, the order they play in, and what the background looks like. …

"Can I share my whole library with my partner?" has been one of the most frequent questions we get. Google Photos has Partner Sharing. Apple has iCloud Shared Photo Library. Both are convenient, but neither is end-to-end encrypted by default. Our users have asked for the same convenience without giving up that guarantee.

Until now, the closest you could get in Ente was selecting multiple albums and sharing them in one batch. It worked, but it was still manual, and it wouldn't include albums you created later.

Today we're introducing Library Sharing: share all the albums you own with a family member in one go, and optionally keep sharing new albums automatically as you create them. All of it end-to-end encrypted, like everything else in Ente.

How it works

Head to Settings → Family, pick a family member, and tap Share albums.

Library sharing on Ente PhotosFrom there you can:

• Share everything at once. Select all the albums you own (or just some) and share them in a single action.
• Choose what they can do. Assign Viewer, Collaborator, or Admin per album, or use one default role across your selection. …

Ente Photos now processes your photos up to ten times faster. For the first time, our ML runs on the GPU. And everything around the models is now lean Rust.

On a recent iPhone, running all models together takes only ~40ms per photo, 10x faster than before. Photos already on your device now index in a fraction of the time.

Why local speed matters so much to us

Everything in Ente is end-to-end encrypted. We can't see your photos, so we can't run ML on them for you. Your phone does the work other services do in a data center.

That makes local processing the whole game. Every model we ship has to run over your entire library, on your device, without draining your battery or getting in your way. The faster it runs, the more we can do with it, for you.

Not just a switch

Telling ONNX Runtime (ORT) to use the GPU is a one line change. Getting a fast model out of it is not.

CoreML and WebGPU (the GPU accelerators) only accelerate the model operators they know. The rest goes back to the CPU. A model that bounces between the two is often slower than one that stayed put. So we rewrote our models.

Our face embedding model has 33 PReLU activations. WebGPU has no kernel for them, so each is now two plain ReLUs: Relu(x) - alpha * Relu(-x). Same math, but now it doesn't bounce between the GPU and CPU.

Our CLIP model had 54 expanded GELU expressions consisting of multiple operators. Each is now one fused Gelu operator that CoreML and WebGPU both understand. …

This started as a small internal itch. I needed a QR code for some merch we were printing. A simple thing. Paste a link, get a QR code, print it, move on with my day.

It wasn't simple.

Every QR site I opened wanted something from me first. Sign in. Accept cookies. Close this popup. Look at this ad. And after all of that, the QR code it finally gave me looked nothing like our design. Wrong colors, ugly corners, sometimes a watermark sitting right on it. So I would download it anyway, open it in an editor, and fix it by hand, every time.

Adobe has a nice one. But it also wants a sign in, and the good parts are paid. I didn't want an account. I wanted a QR code.

The bigger problem is tracking

Most free QR generators don't put your link inside the QR code. They put their link. Someone scans your poster, it first goes to their server, and then it redirects to your page. A random company sits between you and every person who scans your QR, counting the scans, watching where they come from. And if that company folds or decides free was a mistake, every QR you ever printed dies.

So we built our own qr.ente.com

I work at Ente, where we make beautiful privacy apps for everyday use. So building this one was an obvious thing to do. …

We've deployed our first post-quantum crypto change on cast.ente.com. This vets all the moving parts in Ente's transition to quantum-secure cryptography, so now what remains is over time moving the rest of the PQ-affected flows to quantum security.

In the rest of the post, I'll give a brief background of the what and why, explain what we've done, and then outline how it'll tie to the rest of our PQ journey.

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Ente uses cryptography to guarantee that no one, not even Ente, can see your photos and read your documents.

Quantum computers, when they become a reality in the future, will have ways of breaking the security of many of the standard cryptography algorithms.

The bulk of the encryption algorithms we use are already safe even in the presence of quantum computers. The main workhorses: the algorithms (the so-called symmetric-key methods) that Ente uses to encrypt your photos and files and auth codes, all of them have no known weaknesses.

However, a small but important subset of the algorithms (the so-called asymmetric-key methods) that allow Ente users to share photos with other Ente users are not quantum safe.

So the task for us is to migrate these asymmetric-key algorithms to new replacements that are ready for a post-quantum universe. These are affectionately known as PQ algorithms.

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As I mentioned, the bulk of the encryption we use doesn't need changing. The places where sharing happens are the places that need changing. …

I got back into product design at Ente after a while, and the last few weeks have been a blast.

Our latest release includes a lot of improvements - big and small - many of which I've personally been looking forward to for a while.

Interact with memories

Comment and react to shared memories on Ente Photos

Our pursuit of building the best photos app has pushed us to understand how to curate memories we're grateful for.

While solo trips invoke a certain sense of gratitude for existence, there is more depth to the moments that were shared with someone else. Regardless of how picture im-perfect these moments were, glimpses to shared existence are more grounding.

To help leverage this understanding, we have added the ability to comment, react and kick start a conversation on shared memories. This brings your memory back into the feed of everyone you've shared them with.

Share memories

Share memories on Ente Photos

Not everyone is on Ente, unfortunately.

So we've made it easier to select and share specific memories from the sets we curate. We've also polished the view that's presented to your friends when they view your memories.

This is one of my favorite layouts for shared links we've built so far. If you have more ideas on how we could present your photos, let us know!

Save contacts …

I recently created a Paste link with a secret key that I meant to send to my personal chat.

And in a hurry, I accidentally dropped it into one of my group chats. Even though I quickly deleted it for everyone, it left me with a valid concern:

Someone could have opened it before me.

And if that had happened, there would have been no way to know who.

The only way we could think of preventing this was was to add a password to paste. That way, only someone with the password can open it.

And guess what? We shipped it. Now you have a more secure paste.

Paste password protection enabled

But here's the thing - in the first place, I was trying to open the Paste link from my desktop on my mobile. That's why I tried sharing the link.

If there had been a better way to do this, the whole situation could have been avoided.

Turns out, it was already there. I could have created a QR code. I just missed it because it wasn't obvious enough.

So we fixed that too with this update. 😉

One-time Paste link share and copy options

Try it at paste.ente.com.

And if you want to explore a bit more about how it works, we now have a dedicated Paste documentation as well: ente.com/help/paste.

In March, we released Ensu more as an idea than a product. A private, on-device LLM app, shipped early on purpose — so the people who would care about something like this could shape what it becomes.

Then we paused.

We wanted to see whether there was real interest in a privacy-first AI app made in a user-friendly way, and what people would actually ask for once they had it in their hands. Lots of feedback, bug reports, and "have you considered..." messages later, two things stood out:

1. People find value in a private AI app.
2. And there is still so much room for improvement!

So we're picking the work back up. This release is the start of that.

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Gemma 4 by default

On desktop, Ensu now ships with Gemma 4 out of the box. You get noticeably stronger answers from the very first chat, with nothing to configure and no separate download to wait for.

Talk to Ensu

On Android and iOS, you can now tap the mic and speak your prompt instead of typing. Transcription happens locally on your phone, so your voice never leaves the device.

Image queries, way faster

Asking Ensu about a picture used to take a noticeable beat. A round of work under the hood has brought that down to close to instant, across every platform.

Smoother model downloads

Pulling a new model onto your device — desktop or mobile — is dramatically quicker and far more reliable than before. Less waiting, fewer restarts.

• • • …

Grandpa Ducky handing down legacy kit

Ente Locker is for the practical parts of a life: IDs, insurance papers, medical records, passwords, notes, and the documents someone may need in your absence.

Since launch, we learned that someone, without an Ente account, also needs a way to recover your Ente account if you lose access, are incapacitated, or are no longer around.

That is what Legacy Kit is for.

How it works

Recovery sheets from Legacy Kit

Legacy Kit is a set of 3 recovery sheets. Each sheet has a secret QR code and instructions to recover your account. You give each sheet a name ("Son", "Lawyer", "that drawer with all the cables", ...), print or save, and share them separately.

Any 2 of the 3 sheets are enough to recover your account. One sheet on its own is not enough.

The person recovering does not need an Ente account or app. They can open legacy.ente.com and scan 2 of the 3 sheets to access your full Ente account – Photos, Locker and Auth.

Waiting period

Configurable waiting periods for Legacy Kit

Each kit has a configurable waiting period: immediate, 1 day, 7 days, 15 days, or 30 days. …

We've been steadily working on making Ente Photos a great gallery app on Android, one that fits naturally into the everyday moments where you reach for your photos: tapping a camera thumbnail to review a shot, attaching a photo in a messenger, browsing your library without thinking about which app you're in. The latest release is another solid step in that direction.

Pick photos from Ente in other apps

When another app asks you to attach a photo or video, Ente Photos now shows up as one of the apps you can pick from. Open it, browse your library, select what you need, and the original app gets the files back. It works with the system photo picker and with any app that uses the standard Android intents for media.

Open camera shots directly in Ente

After taking a photo, many camera apps show a small thumbnail you can tap to review the shot. On supported camera apps, that thumbnail now opens the photo directly in Ente's viewer — zoom, share, or delete it without leaving Ente.

For details and known limitations (looking at you, Pixel Camera), see the docs.

• • • …

Locker on mobile and web, with offline files and collection sharing

When we launched Locker, we wanted it to be a private place for important information.

The kind you may not open every day, but need quickly when the moment comes. Medical records. Identity cards. Insurance papers. Travel documents. Notes and passwords your family may depend on.

We have been improving Locker around that simple idea.

Your files should be available when you need them. They should be easy to share with the right person. And they should be easier to manage when you are at a computer.

Here's what's new.

Save files for offline use

Some documents cannot wait for a good internet connection.

You can now save files in Locker for offline use on mobile. So when you are travelling, at a hospital, or somewhere with poor network, your selected files can still be opened.

Saved files stay encrypted inside Locker on your phone, so you can keep important documents close without leaving them exposed.

Share collections with links

Once your documents are organized in Locker, there are times when someone else needs access too.

You can now share a whole Locker collection with a link. This is useful for travel papers, medical files, property documents, or any group of files that belong together.

The person opening the link does not need an Ente account. They can open it in their browser and view what you shared. …

A photo takes a second to capture, but what it holds can last a lifetime. Your phone is full of them - birthdays, trips, ordinary Tuesdays that somehow got preserved.

But the tools we use to share photos rarely reflect what those memories are worth. A photo on WhatsApp becomes just another message in a busy chat. A post on Instagram becomes part of a feed, quickly scrolled past.

Neither feels right for a photo of your grandmother from twenty years ago, or your best friend on the last night of a trip you still talk about. Those photos deserve better.

Memory Lane

We built Memory Lane to help show someone how you’ve captured them over the years.

Memory Lane on Ente Photos mobile

Open a person’s page in Ente, and you’ll see a quiet journey through time, told through the photos you’ve taken of them. A face changing slowly. A child growing up. A friendship measured in a handful of special moments.

It’s one of the most personal things you can share.

Share memories as links

Memories in Ente, whether from an anniversary, a party, or a trip you’d half forgotten, can be shared as a link.

Share Memories as a link

The person on the other end sees exactly what you see: the same photos, the same framing, the same feeling of being taken back.

They don’t need an account. They don’t need the app. They just open the link, and it’s there.

Faster links …

We started Ente in 2020 to build a home for memories that could outlive its creators.

When we launched with the ".io" domain, I knew we would eventually have to acquire ".com". I did not know when this would happen, but it was an inevitable milestone.

Today, I'm grateful and proud to share that we own ente.com.

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Ente is an open source, bootstrapped, profitable company. The only people we answer to are our employees and customers, and we are incentivized to optimize for posterity. This domain acquisition is just another step in that direction - a more familiar, permanent address on the internet.

What's next

Our website and docs will move to ente.com.

We will move more pieces (emails, servers, web apps) from .io to .com gradually. All existing links will continue to work.

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Welcome to ente.com.

We've been heads-down building for a while, and we have a lot to share with you. From an offline gallery experience to a better feed, faster ML, and improvements in sharing - here's everything that landed and what it means for you.

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Offline Gallery

You can now use Ente Photos without creating an account. No sign-up, no friction. Once you're in, you can explore smart search, face recognition, and curated memories alongside your photos and albums.

Use Ente Photos without an account

This is our first step toward a genuinely great offline gallery experience, and we have a lot more planned to improve it over time.

Masonry Layout for Links

Masonry Layouts for Public Links

Public links will now show your photos and videos in a beautiful masonry layout by default. It makes a big difference to the experience when someone opens a link. You can customise the layout for each shared album, choosing between masonry, trip, and grouped depending on what you're sharing.

Quick Links on Desktop and Web

Quick Links from Web and Desktop apps

Quick links for single photos and videos can now be created from the desktop and web apps. Links to single photos and videos will now open the item directly in a full screen view.

Social Feed for Your Family …

LLMs are too important to be left to big tech. There is a gap between frontier models and models that can run on your device, but local models improve each day, and once they cross a certain capability threshold, they will be good enough for most purposes; and will come with full privacy and control.

Based on these assumptions, we've been working on Ensu, Ente's offline LLM app. Today is our first release.

Download it here.

In the rest of this post, we'll explain why we think the assumptions hold, what we're doing, and how you can get involved.

Why

LLMs are too important to be left to big tech. We've written in depth about this earlier, here and here.

Briefly, those posts come at it from two angles:

1. If you're someone who hates LLMs, you would still be able to recognize in clearer moments of thought that LLMs are a technology that can't just be wished away.

2. If you're someone who finds joy in interacting with LLMs, you would recognize the lack of privacy and the high dependency (arbitrary bans, content shaping, non-portable memory) you have on centralized providers.

And in both cases it is also clear that LLMs can be used to manipulate people en masse. Ergo, we can't be at the mercy of big tech controlling them.

The issue is that there is a capability gap between large centralized models and smaller models that can be run offline on your device. …

Ente Paste is a simple way to share sensitive text, fast: API keys, snippets, notes, or instructions. It’s built for privacy first:

• End-to-end encrypted links
• Anonymous use (no account required)
• One-time access (opening consumes the paste)
• Automatic expiry after 24 hours
• 4,000-character limit for quick, practical sharing
• Preview crawler protections to avoid accidental consumption

The encryption key stays in the URL fragment (#...), so Ente servers only store ciphertext. After a successful open, the paste is deleted.

If you need lightweight, disposable, encrypted text sharing, try it now: paste.ente.com.

Need a longer-lasting way to share notes? Use Ente Locker for secure, durable sharing.

Ever since I started working on Ente, my father has been asking me to focus on documents, not just photos. It was only when I became a parent that I understood why.

There is a lot of information we have to organize - medical records, insurance policies, identity cards, passwords, and notes - for emergencies.

Today I'm happy to share Locker - an app that is simple enough for our parents, flexible enough for our partners, and gentle enough to support loved ones in our absence.

Ente Locker

You can use Locker to

• save important documents, notes, passwords, and more
• organize them into collections
• share them with links
• set up trusted contacts to access them in your absence

Locker is free - for up to 100 items, all features included. If you're subscribed to Ente Photos, you can store up to 1000 items. More details are available here.

Also, Locker is end-to-end encrypted and fully open source.

We built Locker for the things that matter most. I hope it serves you well.

Get Ente Locker

We kicked off 2026 with two releases that moved Ente Photos significantly forward across sharing, organization, and everyday usability. Across mobile, desktop, and web, we shipped new features and improvements that make sharing more social, photo management easier, and the overall experience more joyful.

2025 to 2026 update

More reasons to share

Likes and comments

Your photos are phenomenal conversation starters. While sharing has always been core to Ente Photos, conversations around shared photos often happened outside that private space. Not anymore.

Likes and comments on shared photos in Ente

You and your loved ones can now like and comment on shared photos across all platforms. Even friends who are not on Ente can react and comment on photos and albums shared via a link.

Incoming likes and comments now appear in the Shared tab and via push notifications in the mobile app, so keeping up with activity is simple and immediate.

Admin role for albums

Party and event albums often involve friends and family uploading large numbers of photos. Managing those albums can quickly become cumbersome, especially when someone needs to review and moderate content.

Admin role for shared albums in Ente Photos …