Ente Release Notes

Today, we're excited to announce the introduction of passkey support on Ente!

Passkeys offer a cutting-edge alternative to traditional two-factor authentication (2FA) methods, such as time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs). With passkeys, the authentication process is streamlined and more secure. Forget about unlocking your phone, searching for your 2FA app, and entering a 6-digit code. Now, you can authenticate effortlessly using your device's biometric capabilities, like fingerprint or facial recognition.

Why add passkeys now?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community dedicated to developing open web standards, introduced the WebAuthn Level 1 standard on March 4, 2019. Think of a standard as a universally agreed-upon playbook. As a respected organization, the W3C wields significant influence over the internet.

Since its introduction, hardware manufacturers, browsers, and password managers have tirelessly worked to integrate passkeys in the most user-friendly way possible. By 2024, passkeys have reached their pinnacle of accessibility. Support for them is now ubiquitous across every major platform, and an increasing number of password managers, including 1Password, Proton Pass, and Bitwarden, offer syncable passkey implementations. …

It's been over a year since we launched Auth, and we're very grateful for the love that it has received.

Auth was a project we started building over weekends because we couldn't find an open source authenticator that offered end-to-end encrypted backups.

We are now here to showcase v3.0, that comes with some major improvements.

Changelog

Here are the highlights of what has been added since v2.0.

Desktop apps

Screenshot of Auth's desktop apps

In addition to our iOS, Android and web apps, we now have apps for Linux, Mac & Windows so you can access and manage your codes from everywhere.

You can grab the latest builds for your platform here.

Pinning & Tagging

Screenshot of Pinning and Tagging features within Auth

You can now pin your favorite codes to the top, so they're always a single tap away.

You can also organize them with tags ("Work", "Personal", ...), to easily find the one you're looking for.

All of this information will be preserved, end-to-end encrypted.

Data migration

We have added support for importing data from a bunch of providers.

Screenshot of the import screen within Auth …

A family of yellow ducklings sitting on a blue couch in front of an old-fashioned TV with a pair of antennae displaying two photograph icons. Text with large font at the top half of the image reads 'Cast albums to TV with Ente.'

Have you ever been to one of those big events or receptions, like weddings, graduation ceremonies or birthday parties? Usually, there will be a slideshow of photos to show the good times. But unfortunately, this slideshow functionality has largely only existed on the big tech photo storage platforms, like iCloud Photos and Google Photos. Being restricted to these platforms comes at a cost of privacy and security. Unlike Ente, your photos may not be end-to-end encrypted by default, leaving them vulnerable to all types of nasty outcomes. Remember the big iCloud photo library leak that lead to numerous celebrity scandals? Yeah, not exactly something you want to happen on your big day.

Fear not though, as Ente now supports photo slideshows! Even though all Ente photo libraries are end-to-end encrypted, slideshow functionality isn't compromised. I'd even argue it's much simpler than the big platforms as our implementation works on any screen, not just Apple TV or Google TV -- so you're not locked into any ecosystem.

Let's get to casting!

1. Curate an album of your favourite photos!

A screenshot of an album title saying 'Canada's Wonderland 20...' …

We take the final step in our open source journey. Our clients had always been open source. Today, we are also releasing the source code for our servers.

Ente is now fully open source.

We’ve consolidated all our code into a single repository – just clone ente/ente on GitHub, and you will have at your disposal a state of the art, end-to-end encrypted, full stack (mobile/web/desktop clients, the server, and a CLI to boot) alternative to Google Photos and Apple Photos.

Us at work!

This is the same code that we are using for our own Cloud offering, so it is battle tested in production. And it’s not a code dump – this is the live, breathing, continuously updated repository where we go about our work everyday.

We feel many of you will find this useful - maybe you are an inquisitive future-founder wondering about how to go about implementing your end-to-end encrypted something, or maybe you’re a self hosting connoisseur who gets happy at the prospect of tinkering with this, or maybe you’re a Go/Flutter/TypeScript engineer who wants to look at an example of these technologies talking amongst each other in a real product at scale. To all of you, we’re happy to be of use.

But our real aim behind open sourcing our servers is to offer yet another reason for Ente customers to feel proud that by choosing Ente, they’ve made the right choice.

• • • …

This post contains an analysis of a recently discovered issue in our iOS app, that affected how we processed Live Photos in certain scenarios.

Summary

• A missing await resulted in zips that were not complete while we processed Live Photos from the iOS app
• Based on anecdotal evidence, and the discovery time (2+ years), we believe a very small percentage of files & users were affected by this bug
• Hot fix and client side migration change was pushed (v0.8.13) on iOS. This update would identify and re-upload affected items
• We have since enabled linter rules to avoid such bugs in the future

What is a Live Photo?

On iOS, a Live Photo consists of two separate assets: one image and the corresponding video. The video duration is typically 2-3 seconds. They're similar to Android's Motion Photos in terms of experience, but there are differences in implementation details.

Personally, I love Live Photos, and more than half of my mobile clicks are live photos. Naturally, this was one of the first major feature that I worked on after joining Ente in July 2021. We had released the mobile app with Live Photo support in Aug 2021.

How Ente stores Live Photos …

We are excited to introduce Ente’s CLI - a tool to download your data from Ente.

[

Screenshot of Ente CLI Github repo

](https://github.com/ente/ente/tree/main/cli#readme)

Some existing customers might wonder, Ente’s desktop app already allows one-click, incremental exports. So why invest energy into building a CLI client for the same?

Short answer

You deserve it.

Long Answer

You are the hero who has taken on the immense responsibility of providing both privacy and durability for the lifelong memories of your loved ones, and you have trusted us at Ente to assist you on this journey.

We’re very grateful for this trust.

Privacy

Ente provides end-to-end encryption with its open-source clients, and has obtained and published external crypto audits for clients and penetration tests for our servers. We have zero product analytics across our apps. Our marketing person isn't very pleased with some of our decisions, but that's a story for another day.

Durability

We replicate data across three different storage providers (two hot & one cold). We've published an article detailing the steps we have taken to ensure service reliability. …

A digital painting of a graph on a tablet computer, surrounded by blocks and cubes. The graph is painted in a brushstroke style, with bright colors and bold lines. The blocks and cubes are also painted in a variety of colors, and they are arranged in a way that suggests they are part of a larger structure. The overall effect is one of creativity and dynamism.

For a while now, Ente has featured a photo editor on its mobile apps, allowing you to make various quick adjustments to your photos without leaving the gallery. You can add a touch of light and color, make subtle rotations until you achieve your desired perspective, and save a copy directly to your library. These simple yet effective changes provide a convenient way to modify the atmosphere of your photos. However, on our web and desktop clients, we didn't have a photo editor, primarily due to the lack of open-source photo editing components that met our high standards for an amazing user experience. After many hours of tinkering in the Ente workshop (aka my desk), we've finally introduced one! For our users, this means a growing suite of useful photo editing tools right in your browser. And for our fellow developer community, stay tuned until the end of this post to learn how we're giving back to the open-source community.

Photographers, Meet New Tools …

Over the last month we updated all our apps to use the Secure Remote Password protocol for authentication.

What is SRP?

Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol is an elegant cryptographic method designed to enhance password based authentication systems. It allows a client and server to prove to each other that they know a secret without actually sharing the secret or its hash across the network.

How does it work?

To use SRP, we need:

• a key derivation function (KDF) that can derive a very large number from your password (we've chosen Argon2id v1.3)
• an SRP group consisting of two numbers: one very large prime and one generator (we've chosen the 4096-bit SRP group)

Setup

To setup SRP, the client generates some non-secret information, and stores it on our servers.

1. User picks a password, from which the client derives a keyEncryptionKey, which is from there on used to encrypt the user's masterKey
2. From this keyEncryptionKey, the client derives a loginKey using libsodium's crypto_kdf_derive_from_key
3. The client then uses this loginKey and the pre-determined SRP group to generate a verifier
4. This verifier, along with the SRP group is then sent to the server for storage, which is from there on never returned back to the client …

Less than a year ago, we launched our authenticator app – Ente Auth.

We built Auth because we couldn't find an open source authenticator app that was cross-platform and offered end-to-end encrypted backups.

Since then, we've made incremental improvements to the product, and are happy to announce general availability of Auth v2.0.

Changelog

Here are the highlights of what has changed since v1.0.

Web app

Screenshot of Auth's web app on the browser

In addition to our iOS and Android apps, we shipped a web app so you can grab your TOTPs from your desktop as well. The app is available @ auth.ente.com

Icons

Screenshot of icons within Ente Auth

We recently added support for showing icons for popular services. This was a feature we built out with our community over a live stream, and it was a lot of fun!

If you find an icon missing, please contribute!

Offline Mode

Recently we received feedback from the Privacy Guides community that requring an account to use the app was a deal breaker, and we had to agree.

So we added an option to use Auth, without signing up for an account.

Screenshots of the import screen within Ente Auth …

In case you haven't been following, we've shipped more improvements over the last few weeks. We believe that Ente should be more than just photo backups, that we should make it easy to organize and rediscover your memories. Some of these are quality of life improvements, that should improve your experience.

Map view

You can now view your photos laid out on a map.

Open an album and click on "View map", or click on the search bar and then on the Map icon to browse in this mode.

Notifications

Notifications on ente

You'll now be notified whenever someone adds a photo to an album you're a part of.

For example if your partner adds a photo to their Camera folder that's shared with you. Or if a collaborator adds photos to one of your albums. Or if you collect photos from someone with a link. You'll be notified! 📸

Album improvements

Improvements to albums on ente

Cover photos

You can now set a cover photo for your albums. This will reflect within shared albums as well.

This was a popular feature our roadmap and we're happy to have shipped it (psst we're now tracking requests on GitHub, 🌟 our repos if you haven't already).

Pinning

Too many albums? Worry not, you can now pin them for easy access. They'll now be pinned to the top of your albums.

• • • …

Hey! Over the last few weeks we shipped a bunch of improvements to our mobile apps.

Here's a summary of the key changes.

Collage

You can now multi-select photos, and click on "Create collage" to craft a single frame that captures your best moments.

Album sort order

Ente's gallery shows you your newest photos first.

This works for the home page.

What about within albums of your trips? Or your dinners?

If such galleries are sorted chronologically, it would be easier to relive those moments while scrolling through the timeline.

You can now make this choice.

Screenshot of Ente's sort by setting

Your choice will reflect within shared links as well.

Shared photos in your home gallery

Photos shared with you will now pop up in your home gallery. So if your partner has shared their Camera, their latest clicks will pop up next to yours.

To opt out of this, you can Archive the album.

Gallery performance

We've been working hard to improve how smoothly our gallery scrolls.

We're building the best photos app, and it is important that our interactions are fluid.

We've done quite a bit of engineering to accomplish these improvements (blog post incoming).

We aren't done though, there are more performance improvements being worked on, which will get shipped over this month.

Improved de-duplication …

GDPR mandates that businesses provide a way for users to download their data in an accessible format. This right to data portability ensures digital sovereignty. We must own our data.

Since our first launch, Ente has provided a way to export the data you've trusted Ente with, with a single-click.

This was in stark contrast to bigger companies with infinite resources who make it a hassle to get your data out of their systems.

As we grew, we found out people were using the feature not just to export their data, but also to keep a local copy of their memories. Some users even started using this as a way to keep an extra copy of their data else where.

Since we did not have these use cases in mind when we initially built the feature, users started running into limitations.

So, we decided to re-build Export from ground up, with the aim of making it a much better experience for user who wish to keep a local copy of their data.

Continuous Sync

Continuous sync eliminates the need to run exports manually every time new photos are added to Ente.

Now whenever our desktop app gets to know that there are new files are available on Ente, the export is ran automatically, and your local folders will reflect the state on remote.

This means not only will the exported data contain newer files, it will also mirror the latest state of your albums, by applying moves and deletes.

Ente's continous data exports …

The most upvoted feature since we launched Ente was for a way to search through photos by the locations they were clicked at.

This made sense. Most of us associate our memories with the places we made them. So we quickly added a feature where you could enter a location name, and the app would filter out photos clicked at that location.

But this had a problem. You see, photos don't contain the names, but only coordinates of their location. So to perform a search, the apps would have to send your search query to our servers to convert it into coordinates (geocoding) that could be used to filter locations that fell within that area.

There is beauty in having zero knowledge of your data, and we wanted to keep things that way. So we dropped this implementation, and the original problem resurfaced. You could no longer filter photos with their location.

Until now.

Introducing, Location Tags – a privacy friendly way to search through your Photos by their location.

You can now tag a photo with a location name, and define a radius to it. ente will automatically cluster all photos that fall within this radius under that location.

Open a photo, and click on Info > Add location to create your first location tag!

Your searches will run locally on your device, and your location tags are stored end-to-end encrypted. So Ente will have zero knowledge of your locations or search history 😊 …

We're happy to announce that Ente's architecture and source code have been successfully audited by Cure53, in collaboration with Symbolic Software.

Cure53 is a leading German cybersecurity firm and Symbolic Software is a French software consultancy that focuses on applied cryptography and building incredibly hard puzzles.

Together they have certified that Ente's architecture is sound and that our implementation across all clients is cryptographically accurate.

We are proud to have received this attestation from two prestigious organizations. Your data is and always has been end-to-end encrypted on Ente.

The only high severity issue that was discovered during the audit was that we were allowing users to set weak passwords within our web app. This is a high severity issue because weak passwords can be brute forced. We've deployed a fix that prevents setting of weak passwords, and this has been verified by the auditors.

The two medium severity issues that were pointed out were already known and have limited impact in the present day. Implementing these recommendations will harden our protocols further by scoping the impact of compromised encryption keys, so we intend to incorporate them in the future. …

At Ente, we have always believed in organic growth. Our customers have been our best advocates, and we have focussed on building a high quality product that is worth vouching for.

Now it's time that we gave you more reasons to bring your family and friends on board. Say hello to our Referral Program.

For every paid customer you now bring on board, you will receive 10 GB of free storage. The referred customer will receive an additional 10 GB of storage as well!

Screenshot of Ente's referral program

You can find your unique referral code under Settings → General → Referrals, and share it with your friends. Once they subscribe to Ente and apply your code, both of you will receive 10 GB of free storage.

In total, you can double your available storage by convincing your friends to upgrade to an end-to-end encrypted cloud :)

So what are you waiting for? Share your referral code and double your storage now!

Oprah wants you to refer your friends to ente

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Please find the terms and conditions of the referral program here.

tl;dr;

Ente desktop now has an experimental option in advanced settings to enable on-device ML. When enabled, Ente will run on-device ML to index photos for object and face search. These indexes are currently not synced to the server, and thus will need to be recreated later.

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Behind the scenes we've been working on adding on-device machine learning to ente, and using it for searching and grouping photos by the contents of the photos, including the faces of the people in them.

And we've made progress indeed: we've had a working prototype with this in ente desktop since last year. Our plan had been to release this on Ente desktop so that power users can start using it, and then subsequently add support for it in the mobile app.

However, after talking to some customers, and introspecting on how we ourselves use Ente, we realized that mobile is where this is perhaps more useful.

So as we started work on the mobile version of this (some exciting news on that front very soon!). But in the meanwhile the desktop version never got released.

Ente desktop just lingering whilst we worked on the mobile version of face search

It wasn't that we forgot about it though 😬 There's a technical reason why we didn't release it. To explain this reason, let us first provide a bit of background on what we're trying to do. …

You can now create shared albums where multiple users can add photos.

This was a widely awaited feature, as you can see by the upvotes and comments on the roadmap item for album collaboration.

This is a huge feature. Every trip we have a shared album that all upload to. Please add!

Ente already allows you to collect photos of events and trips via public links, but that is aimed at collaboration with people who do not have the Ente app.

Collaborative albums go beyond public links. The experience is much more streamlined since everything happens inside the same app. And they also solve for additional use cases:

• Sharing albums with partners, where either of them can add photos.

• Creating (for example) baby picture albums where parents add photos, and grandparents and greater family are added as viewers.

• Photographers creating collaborative albums to track photos they take as they cover occasions, with view access for their clients.

We hope you also find this feature useful.

There are many ways we can, and are, taking this forward from here. Some things we're planning to work on are: shared timelines, comment, reactions, and the ability to copy shared photos to one's own account. Based on feedback we will determine the next set of sharing enhancements.

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You can add and manage collaborators in the sharing settings of an album. …

Incredibly powerful.

You can create links to your albums, that can be shared with folks who are not on Ente. Your photos remain end-to-end encrypted. Wonder how we do this? This is how.

You can also let them add photos to your album. They don't need an account, or an app! Needless to say, everything they add remains end-to-end encrypted.

Ente's Powerful Links

If you are looking for additional security, you can protect your links with a password.

Also, if you like the idea of your memories being ephemeral, you can configure these links to go poof 💨 after some time.

That's not all!

You can even limit the number of times your links can be forwarded. So you don't have to worry about your photos reaching strangers.

Ok that's all, for now.

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Think we can do more? Let us know by Tweeting @enteio.

Imagine you're organizing a birthday party for your child. There'll be many people there – your friends, your kid's friends, your kid's grandparents, and maybe even some friends of your kid's grandparents. Generations, each with different viewpoints.

It is one of the magical powers provided to us by photographs - to see, in as incomplete and partial manner as it is, but to see - the world as seen from the eyes of others.

For all the advances that have been made with phones, apps and social media, this use case – collecting all the viewpoints from which an event that was important to you was viewed – has still not been solved (we feel) to a satisfactory extent.

All the current solutions have problems – either lock in with a particular walled garden, or sharing compressed low quality versions spread across chat apps that are hard to collate, or sharing (still in low quality) on public social media platforms where more eyes than you care for see your private memories.

Indeed, one of the goals in our vision for ente is to solve for this particular use case. We're not there yet, but it is a goal we wish to achieve, and have been working towards.

Today, we announce another small but substantial step we've taken towards this goal. Ente now supports collecting photos from anyone without them needing an Ente account, or even the Ente app.

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The way this works is: within the link sharing settings for a shared album, there is now an option to "Allow adding photos". …

There are two opposing forces at play for the prompts that are shown when the user tries to delete a photo.

• For heavy users, prompting too much, and too often, can be irritating. Worse, it could lead to prompt blindness as they start ignoring the prompts and just blindly tap on the continue option, potentially not paying attention to new changes.

• For new users, not prompting enough is risky because it can result in data loss if we fail to communicate to the user what is the impact of the action they're taking.

We recently came to know of a case in the second category, where unfortunately our prompts didn't warn enough, and the customer ended up deleting something without realizing it'll get deleted permanently.

In light of this, we have decided to rework our deletion prompts. We felt it'd be a good idea to also publish our choices (it might provide a data point for other products evaluating where in the midst of those two opposing forces to try and be).

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Deletion in Ente is more involved than it might seem. There are two distinct actions:

• Deletion (where an item is moved to trash, from where it'll be permanently deleted in 30 days).

• Remove from album (where an item is only removed from the current album, but it'll stay in the other albums it is a part of). …