One of our big goals for Photos this year, apart from adding new capabilities and features, was to improve the experience of using the app. Since v1.0, we have been spending a lot of time on this - improving performance, making workflows easier, reducing moments of irritation and creating moments of serendipity.
Our latest release is a reflection of our efforts towards this goal.
Birthday Memories and Notifications
Your photos are a celebration of life. With that in mind, we have also introduced a new memory for all the birthdays you have saved on Ente. On the saved date, we will generate a collection of photos for you to browse through and share. And an opt-out notification to remind you of the birthday as well. The more people you save and add birthdays to, the better the experience gets for you and your loved ones.
Memories Experience
The act of looking at old photos, and reminiscing is a very joyous experience. Which is why we are incredibly bullish on memories - how to surface the right photos at the right time. We have put in a lot of effort in this direction so far this year - from building out smart memories, connecting widgets with memories, to on this day memory and notifications. However, the visual appearance of the feature did not match the emotions we were trying to evoke.
In this release, we have substantially improved this experience. Autoplay is now available in the latest update, along with better gesture based controls like tap for next photo, swipe to next memory and swipe down to close. We have also moved away from the harsh black background to a softer blurred finish.
Background Sync on iOS
Finally!!! Opening the app periodically to let it backup the photos you have taken is a chore. Not any more. We have cracked background syncing on iOS. You just take your photos anytime you want, and when you’re done, put the phone back in your pocket. Ente Photos will upload all your photos in the background, so they are ready to edit, share and show the world when you open the app the next time.
This is an important step for the team. The app does a large amount of processing on-device. And now, with background workers being supported both on Android and iOS, we have started working on offloading more processing to the background. This should, therefore, result in significantly better app performance in the future.
Resumable Uploads and Downloads
We have been testing resumable uploads for quite some time, and are finally confident of rolling it out to everyone. What this means for you is that uploads, especially for large files and videos, are going to happen faster without having to worry about keeping the app open. While also saving reducing network consumption due to repeated attempts.
Same with downloads. While viewing a large video, it was necessary to keep the app open on a particular screen, otherwise the download would start from zero again. Now, downloads will resume from where it paused when you swipe or close the app. A much needed quality of life improvement.
Doing this, and background uploads was incredibly important for what comes next.
Support for Large Videos
With uploads/downloads now more resilient and uploads happening in the background on all mobile devices, we are finally confident of increasing the upload limit to 10GB. This also comes on the back of our work on video streaming (still in beta), which makes the experience of viewing large video files better.
This was a highly requested feature as a lot of our customers were not able to move away from their existing provider or had a large home video collection.
Improvements to Facial Recognition
While our models for facial recognition have been working reasonably well (not that it cannot improve), a lot of complaints we had received were around the feedback system - How it is difficult to edit faces in photos, how suggestions are hidden deep, how all detected faces are not visible, etc.
While making small under the hood changes, we also made the experience of providing feedback better. Review suggestions are now proactive and will help you to the right tags for the right people much faster. We have also made it much easier to add and remove people in a single photo. And finally, all detected faces would now be visible in the people list.
We will be continuing to work on this area and are working on improving our clustering system and making it better for detecting faces across ages.
More pleasing albums tabs
In the last release, we have changed how we show albums in the albums tab to allow for better organisation workflow. However, we were not very happy with the outcome as the visuals felt too tight and cluttered. Around the same time, our designers were working on building out a new visual design language which is softer and easier on the eyes. We ended up implementing some of those ideas on the albums tab and were really happy with the results.
The new albums tab is a glimpse of how we plan to evolve our design system. If we get positive feedback from you on this, our plan is to incorporate a similar style to other parts of the app one screen at a time.
Coming up
We will continue working on improving the experience of using Ente Photos. We are rewriting the gallery experience to help us improve scrolling performance, and also unlock features like Swipe to Select, Jump to Date, Mosaic Layout, and Similar Photo stacking. We are expecting these to be available over the next 3-4 months.
The team is also working on new features like smart albums, an interface to clean your library, an improved image editor, and a local-first mode. Apart from these, performance improvement across the board is also a priority workstream for the team.
We are quite excited about the upcoming releases, and can’t wait for you to try out some of the things the team has been working on.
If you'd like to talk to us please join our Discord.