As a programmer, it's a bit embarrassing to admit that it took us 40,000+ commits to release the first major version – v1 – of a photos app.

The story began in 2020, when we had to choose between privacy and convenience while storing our photos. We felt the need to engineer an experience that brought together the best of both worlds, for ourselves.

v1 was the arbitrary checkpoint we had in mind, where we could tell the world that our work was mature enough for them.

Over the last 5 years, we have poured our hearts into building a beautiful, end-to-end encrypted photos app, and here we are.

v1

The video is a teaser, here are more details on what's packed into v1.

Privacy

End-to-end encryption – so only you can see your photos.

This was the foundation on top of which we built Ente, to guarantee that we respect the privacy and sanctity of your data with technology rather than policy.

Simplicity

This is what took us so long to get here.

While starting Ente, our vision of a "minimum viable product" included features like face recognition and search. Delivering these features with end-to-end encryption turned out to be harder than we thought.

It took us multiple years to deliver ente.io/ml, but deliver we did.

Search

You can now search for people, objects, scenes and more in your photos.

Search runs locally, on-device, without a need for network connectivity.

Discover

Starting v1, Ente Photos will shine light on the important people in your life and bring back special moments from past trips and celebrations. Again, all local.

You can also set up a widget on your phone's homescreen to discover these memories without having to open the app.

Brand

The only other item in our checklist for v1 was an icon – to tie a bow on top of it all.

We spent a year thinking about, painting and staring at pixels that could best represent our work, and this is what materialized.

We've put a lot of heart (literally) into this. But not everyone likes change, so we've added an icon-switcher if you wish to switch to the original icon that got us here.

Reliability

We store 3 copies of your encrypted data in 3 clouds, across 3 locations. One of them is in an underground fallout shelter.

We've gone to great lengths to ensure that Ente is as reliable as it can be. These efforts are invisible to end customers, but we are proud of our infrastructure's maturity.

Availability

One of our major gripes with a big tech company that advertises privacy is that they break accessibility.

You can access your data only from their devices.

Since Ente's first public release, we've been available everywhere.

and more

Along the way, we've shipped a lot, with help from our community.

We built links so you can share and collect photos. We built family plans so you can bring your family over. We built guest view to solve the problem of "accidental" swipes. We built Legacy so your family can inherit your memories.

We made it easy to export your data from Ente – with our Desktop app and CLI (!) offering incremental exports.

I could go on, there's more.

Fully open source

Ente is fully open source.

If you are savvy, you can run Ente on your own server in a minute.

Future

This is only v1.

Ente is a company that we hope will last multiple generations – we have an endless road ahead. Photos is a ridiculously romantic thing to build on top of – joy and gratitude have no ceiling.

We're currently working on

• video streaming
• fresh gallery layouts
• local-first version that does not need an account, and
• feed for shared memories

There's a lot more to do.

We're incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped us get this far – family, friends, customers, community and internet freefolk who graced us with their kindness.

If you would like to be a part of the journey ahead, check out Ente Photos.

Onwards to v2.

p.s. we're hosting an AMA with our community on 5th April, 2025