A tech product is quite similar to the ship of Theseus. You keep replacing decaying old parts that no longer work as well as you would want. And sometimes you need to add new mechanisms to keep up with the demand. Over a period of time, what started as a simple system built to test waters evolves into a behemoth that can take on the best ship out there.
Our latest release is about replacing something old, while also adding something new.
Custom layouts
Some of you might know that the team has been working on rewriting the home gallery - both to improve performance and to enable new features. This latest update marks the first release of that project.
While there are a bunch of performance improvements, the most visible aspect is the ability to group your photos as you like - day, week, month of year. Together with grid size configuration, this allows you to customise your gallery view exactly like you want.
Another outcome of this project is
Quick(er) scroll
The scroll bar on the gallery has been redesigned as well. We have introduced yearly markers for a quick jump across the timeline, while also adding haptics for better feedback. We are also expecting a smoother scroll experience as a result of this.
Both of these features mark a milestone for the team working on this project. There is still a lot to do though. The team has already started working on jump to date, swipe to select, with mosaic layout to follow soon after.
Advanced image editor
Continuing with the theme of replacement, we are releasing an advanced image editor. This brings aspect ratio selection to cropping, and 10 new filters for quick edits. Moreover, we have added the ability to fine tune your clicks by changing brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, and a lot more. And there is more. You can also draw freehand on the selected image or add emojis as a sticker.
That’s all for replacing something old. Here’s something new.
Smart albums
Ente Photos now has the ability to add photos of people automatically to your albums. Both new and existing albums have an option to auto-add people. An outcome of our improved ML capabilities, the feature works by detecting faces in your photos, and then automatically adding it to configured albums. Auto-add people also works with collaborators. For e.g, both you and your wife can configure auto-add for your child’s photo into the same album.
This is an important step in our journey to build a great photo sharing experience within Ente Photos. Once properly configured, this will allow for a zero-click sharing. And we have plans to improve this further. We want this entire process to run faster, so all you have to do is click a photo, and Ente can do upload, face detection, and sharing without you having to open your app.
Coming up
The gallery is on its journey towards improvement. We have already talked about jump to date, swipe to select, and mosaic layouts. Add similar photo stacking to that list. We are also expecting a lot of performance gains as a result of this exercise.
A better sharing experience is in work, and so is a local-first mode on mobile. Overall performance improvements are also expected as we move more compute to the background - starting with ML indexing, which is the backbone for a lot of in-app functionality.
All in all, a few very exciting months ahead.
If you have feedback on this release, and would like to talk to us, please join us on Discord.