Ente Release Notes

Ente Photos was born out of our own needs, as casual photographers who like to cherish memories.

Over the last year, while developing our infrastructure, we had a hard time finding a place to preserve our two-factor secrets.

Given that Ente already had a platform for reliably storing and syncing data, encrypted end-to-end, we decided to leverage that to cure this itch.

Introducing,

Ente Auth

Screenshots of the Authenticator app

Ente Auth is an open-source authenticator app that will let you backup and view your 2FA secrets. You can find more information about the project here: github.com/ente/ente

In an attempt to give back to the community who have helped us build all that we have, this service will be offered free of cost.

If in the future we convert this to a paid service, existing users will be grandfathered in. So please sign up @ ente.com/auth

Now back to building the best photos app :)

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Updates

• Auth v2
• Auth v3
• Auth v4

When you get hold of a cool photo, it is already a hassle to find the right place to put it. Even more so when you have to remember to backup so that you can stop worrying about losing it.

Well, we have solved at least the latter problem by shipping the ability to watch folders on desktop ✨

Introducing, "Watched folders"

Now, the desktop app will have the ability to "watch" a folder for any changes happening to it. This will be a one-way sync from your computer to Ente's cloud.

Watched folders screen

With this, the desktop app will keep looking for any changes (like the addition of new files, or the removal of existing files) in the "watched" folders of the computer. These changes will then be automatically synced upstream into an ente album whenever Ente app is started or is running in the background.

This will also support nested folders so you don't have worry about individually adding all of your desktop folders - just add the main parent folder and all the files of the nested folders will get synced to their respective albums. You can even choose if you wish to sync nested folders to a single album or separate albums.

How does it work?

At a high level, the technical implementation of this feature maintains a file called 'watch status' containing a textual mapping of the files on the disk to the files synced on the servers. We use this as a state to identify which files are synced or unsynced on the server. …

Recently we ran into an issue on our Android app, that caused us to not capture location data embedded within photos, on devices running Android 10 and above.

As of writing this post, the issue has been fixed and a migration script has been deployed to detect and re-upload affected photos.

Here's a timeline of how the story evolved:

• 29.05.2022 - the issue was introduced in v0.5.26.
• 06.06.2022 - the issue was discovered.
• 06.06.2022 - a fix was deployed that solved the issue for newer files that were backed up.
• 09.06.2022 - a migration script was deployed that scanned through older files and re-uploaded those with missing location data.

We also updated our servers to break the "free up space" functionality on the affected builds, to retain the original files on device.

Root Cause

What caused this issue was a seemingly harmless commit that updated our Android app's compileSdkVersion to 32. …

Summer is here. Skirts and sun. Having toned its muscles all through the winter darkness, today Ente steps out on the beach 🤍

Enough with the metaphors though. Today, we're releasing the redesigned ente that supports both light and dark modes. You don't need to do anything - ente will automatically adapt the look according to the system settings. A classy light mode during the day, and a stunning dark mode for the night.

This is the first (and biggest) batch of design related changes. This establishes the base look of Ente for the near future. We will now start on more granular and continuous improvements to individual screens. A pixel here, a pixel there, improving both the look and usability of Ente on a screen by screen basis.

Support for light mode was currently the highest voted open roadmap item, and so we feel happy completing that feature request. But beyond just a feature, we feel it marks an important transition in Ente's journey – to a more inclusive design that does not seem intimidating to non tech savvy users who still wish to take control of their data and privacy.

The redesigned look is now out on the mobile apps. If you're not already on the Ente hype train, now is a good time!

Download Ente on the iOS App Store

Download Ente on the Google Play Store …

We have shipped an improvement to make your uploads faster ⚡️

How uploads happened before

When uploading a file, we fetched a list of URLs from the server to PUT files to. Then, the encrypted files / file parts were uploaded to those URLs, that are hosted on storage servers located in Europe.

We noticed that this could be improved by proxying data through Cloudflare Workers that are deployed across the world, there by ensuring proximity to our customers. There was also the added advantage of Cloudflare's great network speeds.

How uploads happen now

Now, we upload the same encrypted file / file parts to the Cloudflare Worker rather than directly uploading to our servers in Europe. The Worker then uploads these to our servers.

Even though this has increased the complexity of uploads on the backend, this has made our uploads faster due to the Workers being closer and having greater network speeds. This gain is even more pronounced for large multi-part uploads.

We got the following results from a sample test using the same set of files:

File size

Before

After

Improvement

2.6 MB

5.3 s

4.1 s

23.42%

2.7 MB

4.3 s

5.6 s

28.88%

3.3 MB

8.1 s

8.1 s

0.46%

23 MB

23 s

21 s

8.60%

141 MB

119 s

82 s

31.20%

354 MB

306 s

217 s

29.01%

This change is currently live on our web and desktop apps and we will be bringing it to our mobile apps soon. We hope you'll be happy to see faster uploads! 😊

• • • …

We hate the reliance mobile apps are forced to have on centralized stores. These gatekeepers demand a hefty tax to circumvent the inconveniences they have created.

We have always maintained a direct path to get ourselves into the hand of our customers on Android devices. Thanks to GitHub, you could always grab our latest builds, built straight from source.

Now in addition to this, we have crossed the checkpoint of getting ente published on F-Droid! 🏁

Download Ente on F-Droid

It took us a while because we had to carve out a separate branch of the codebase without certain important third party libraries (billing, error reporting, push notifications). From our internal tests, we found no teething issues. But if you find something amiss, please click on "report bug" from the settings screen and we'll be quick to fix it!

That's all for now. Towards a freer, simpler, safer world!

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If you like what we're building, come hang out with us on Discord. Or if you simply want to be notified of future product updates, follow us on Twitter!

Hey!

2 years ago, we started building Ente to provide a safe space for our families to store their memories. It's been a beautiful journey so far, and we've learned a lot more about what photos mean to us and our customers.

Since launch, the loudest feedback we heard was the need for a single subscription to manage a whole family's photo storage needs.

To that effect, today we are happy to announce the launch of Family Plans.

Ente Family plans

As a paid customer, you can now share your storage space with your loved ones, at no additional cost. You can access this feature by tapping "manage family" on your subscription page.

We hope this will let you derive more value out of your subscription while giving us an opportunity to serve your family.

If there's something we can do better, please let us know, we would love to. Join us on Discord or say hello on Twitter!

Hey!

We've shipped some major under-the-hood improvements to our desktop app.

The app now supports resumable uploads for large folders. This means that if your app or system crashes, and you reopen the app, it will resume the uploads from where it left off.

This change also gets us one step closer towards the end goal of watching a folder continuously for updates, similar to what Dropbox does.

Apart from this, the desktop app now supports Takeout.zips that are downloaded from Google.

Support for importing Google Takeout zips

You no longer have to uncompress them and upload the extracted folders. ente will take care of parsing the archive efficiently, and processing the photos, videos and metadata files within it.

This will save you a few clicks and quite a lot of disk space.

Huge thanks to im7mortal who gave us the idea and to everyone who helped us test this out!

You can grab the latest builds from here:

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux - RPM
• Linux - DEB

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As for what's next, we are redesigning all our screens. So you can expect prettier pixels the next month! ✨

These have been a hard couple of weeks for this world. What's happening in Ukraine is heartbreaking. We hope for evolution to speed up and for goodness to triumph.

We are offering free services to anyone affected by this tragedy. Please email us and we will help you preserve all that you want.

We've been trying to keep ourselves busy with work. Over the last few weeks we shipped the following improvements to the product:

• Ability to disable downloads and set passwords, expiry times and device limits to album links
• Support for import and playback of Live Photos on the web
• Accurate creation time detection for videos that were exported from Google / Apple Photos
• Slew of bug fixes and performance improvements across all platforms

We also pledged ourselves to Stripe Climate (to aid in carbon removal), documented our architecture for link sharing, and started a Discord server to share updates and to engage in conversations with our community.

That's all.

Wish you lots of peace and love.

Hello!

Hope you've had a pleasant 2022 so far.

It's been a while since our last update. We've been busy with both life and work. Neeraj became a dad the last month and I became one the last week. Two healthy, happy, baby girls. :)

So Abhinav has been pulling the weight by himself for a while.

Excuses aside, these are the changes we shipped over the last month:

• Improved the syncing flow and deduplication logic on our mobile app.
• Squashed a few hard-to-catch bugs on our server that was causing it to crash intermittently.
• Added reviews to our website (thanks for the kind words everyone!)
• Got our web app to work in incognito mode.
• And lastly, as the title suggests, shipped the ability to share links to albums, end-to-end encrypted. Here are some photos from our team outing the last year. :)

Shareable links for albums

Building a platform that enables sharing of encrypted content, comes with its own caveats, and we've taken the following steps to mitigate the possibility of this feature being abused:

• Only paid customers can share links to their albums.
• Albums can be shared at most with 50 devices.
• People who have access to an album can report the content for abuse here. …

These are the changes included in Ente's latest release

• Background sync on iOS
• Ability to view and terminate active sessions
• Auto-fill for passwords and 2FA codes
• Mnemonic recovery codes that are easy to write down (the older codes will remain functional)
• Option to edit file names
• Ability to embed metadata edits into the original files during export (wherever supported)
• Option to select and download multiple files on web

Getting the iOS client to sync photos in the background took us a lot more time than expected. There was no official documentation to refer to and we had to scavenge to get things to work. Due to platform constraints, our solution is not as responsive as it is on Android. But you can trust Ente to eventually backup the photos you snap on your iPhone, in the background.

We also got stuck trying to embed certain metadata edits (eg. file-creation-time) back into their original files. We had to take a hard call and ignore certain file formats (like HEIC) for now, since there are no tools that let us update the EXIF data within those formats. That said, we believe in providing a painless data export experience and we will revisit this sometime in the future. For now, we've left a TODO on our roadmap.

• • • …

The past few weeks were healthy for us. We took some time off to breathe, recharge and improve our infrastructure and API contracts.

Apart from these invisible enhancements, we shipped the following requested features

• 500 GB plan for $9.99 / month
• Trash, with the ability to recover deleted files
• Option to delete files only from Ente (this might sound trivial but it required some state management to ensure that such deleted files don't get backed up again, across re-installs)
• Ability to change file timestamps
• Ability to range-select items on web by holding the Shift key

The most exciting development for us was that Shailesh, the creator of DopeAI, decided to join us to help make Ente more intelligent. We are super excited to have someone of his caliber and clarity on board and can't wait to make Ente more useful for you!

We already have the underlying architecture for adding artificial intelligence in a way that preserves your privacy, and are looking forward to leveraging this over the next few months.

As for the next release, we will be focusing on improving the reliability of background syncs on both iOS and Android, shipping a "light" theme and implementing sharing via URLs.

That's all for now. Wish you a cozy few weeks ahead. :)

September was tough.

One of the challenges of building an e2ee product is that even the most trivial of data model changes requires a client in the middle. Since all of your data is encrypted with your key, your app has to remodel necessary bits of information, encrypt it and send it back to our servers for a migration to fully succeed. We got a taste of this inconvenience for the first time last month. But that's okay because this is a necessary evil that will become easier with time.

Another key learning was that it's time for us to get out of our comfort zones as programmers and to start focusing on Ente's growth. As engineers we are wired to look at most forms of sales and marketing as evil. "If something is great, it will sell itself " is the expectation. But constant feedback and work is required for a product to grow its roots. To garner the former and to afford the latter, we need to grow into unfamiliar roles and find customers who need Ente. This is uncharted territory for us and we look forward to venturing into it.

Moving on, these are some of the product improvements we shipped the last month:

• Ability to detect and delete duplicate files to save space (currently it's limited to exact duplicates and not "similar images", we'll iterate on this)

• Option to archive files so that you can reduce noise from your timeline …

We've had an exciting last couple of weeks in terms of both building and customer acquisition.

Here's a summary of the product improvements we made the last month:

• Rewrote our web-uploader from scratch
• Improved the retrial mechanism for uploads on mobile
• Enabled versioning for files to safeguard against accidental / malicious modifications
• Added support for live photos on iOS
• Moved to Stripe for accepting payments on Android, which means discounted annual plans are now available there too
• Slashed the prices for our 1000 GB and 2000 GB plans
• Integrated ffmpeg into our web client improving the thumbnail generation for videos
• Added the ability to change your email address

And finally, we showed readers of HackerNews what we've building: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

The reaction we received was overwhelmingly positive and we're very grateful for it all.

As for what's next, we're going to put our heads down and continue to build. Our focus for this month will be on

• Improving our design elements
• Laying the foundations for implementing indexing and search
• Adding features to help you organize your memories better (move, rename, archive, deduplicate, ...)
• Shipping our blog and knowledge base (something we've been procrastinating for too long) …

July was an interesting month for us. Our small, remote team got together and hung out for the first time. It was nice to spend time in-person and talk about the things we want to do next, and the things we need to go back and improve upon.

Coming to July's deliverables, we had underestimated the complexity of certain things we wanted to build (like adding support for live photos and shipping a progressive web app), and could not ship them within the time-frame we wanted to. But we did ship some other things like:

• Larger (and smaller) subscription plans (10 GB - 2000 GB)
• A desktop app that lets you keep a local copy of all the items you've backed up on ente
• A widget within the settings screen that displays your usage details
• The ability to change your registered email address
• Ability to ignore videos and backup only images
• Improvements to the image viewer which now shows you EXIF information, among other things

July 2021 updates

While we were busy building these, Google's algorithms decided that it would be fun to call us a "spyware" and ban us from the PlayStore. We had to spend unnecessary time and energy to get things straightened out. …

We're half way through 2021, and I hope it's been as peaceful a ride for you as it could have been.

June was an eventful, productive month for us.

Firstly, as committed, we shipped an image editor to help you flip and crop and add some pop to your photos.

We also added an option to our mobile apps to free up space by deleting photos and videos that have already been backed up.

Apart from these, we've also increased the security of our authentication flow. An attacker will now have to verify ownership of your email and also prove knowledge of your password to authenticate against our servers. You can get a high level overview of how this works here.

In addition to this, we've also added a conventional "two-factor" authentication that you can opt into. Given the design of our authentication flow that now requires you to exhibit ownership of your email and your password, this technically adds a third-factor, but to avoid confusion we will just call it "two-factor" 🤷

We've also shipped a slew of infrastructure improvements that we as engineers are proud of, but will remain invisible to end users. But we're happy, and I just wanted to share that with you.

June 2021 updates

You can grab the latest builds on PlayStore, AppStore or GitHub. …

Hey!

It's been an overwhelming couple of days for us. We're grateful for the warm welcome we received on reddit 😊

You have been vocal about the features you want us to build, and we'll prioritize them and share our roadmap for June in a few days.

For now, we would like to show you something Abhinav has been slogging on for the last few weeks - the ability to filter your photos by the places and days they were taken at.

This is currently available on photos.ente.com.

We hope you will enjoy this feature.

I personally love how I can filter out important dates over the years. And I'm amused by how it interprets natural language queries like "yesterday", "last week", etc.

That said, for this to delight you as much as it delights me, you might need to drag-and-drop all your old photos into photos.ente.com. and let it back them up. Even if the uploads are interrupted, you can just drag-and-drop again into the same album, it'll resume where it left off.

In case you have any feedback to share, please let us know by either posting on our public roadmap, or writing to me directly!