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?
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
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
I’m not sure why every time I look at this project, it rubs me the wrong way. Anyone found anything wrong with it?
Its self hostable now, and I’m my playing around with the self hosted version it seems fine
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
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
I want more ducks
