News

Successful security audit. The best open source OCR on Android. Swipe to Select. Trip layout. Notesnook joins as a friend. FLOSS/fund. Mo and more!

Ente completes CERN sponsored audit

CERN has been a heavy user of Ente, and they volunteered to sponsor an audit of Ente. The audit was conducted by 5 researchers from the German cybersecurity firm Cure53 over a period of two weeks. Ente passed with flying colors 🙂

Full details about the audit are in the completion announcement. We'd like to thank both CERN (both as customers, and for their commitment to improving open source security), and Cure53 for their expertise.

The Best open source OCR on Android

The Ente Photos mobile app now supports detecting text in your photos and screenshots.

This works on both iOS and Android. In particular, the implementation on Android is state of the art, miles ahead of other open source mobile apps. A lot of effort went into this, and while there are still improvements to be made, we think you'll be proud already with what you see.

Swipe to Select

The mobile app also gets swipe to select on the gallery. Faster easier selection, without needing to lift your finger.

Other notable features include a landscape layout for the gallery, useful for tablets, and a freshened up set of memories like "Playful kids", "Lakeside calm", "Winter adventures", "Neon nights" and more.

Album filtering on Desktop

Talking of freshening up, the desktop app got a new release with

• Support for filtering in all album selection dialogs
• A new way to create albums without uploading photos to them
• Other recent goodies related to sharing (Trip layout, custom domains, embed HTML, etc)

Map based Trip Layout!

Ente now supports a new map-based "trip layout" when creating public links for your shared albums. Checkout the video we made for promoting the feature (psst, share it with your friends!).

Anand, the engineer who made the feature, also wrote about why he felt motivated to build this feature. We also have some example albums for you to see the feature in action:

• A two month, 1000 km cycle trip in the Himalayas
• A week in the German countryside

Notesnook joins as a friend

Ente's hat-trick of friendships continues, with Notesnook joining the alliance now as the third friend alongside Kagi and Tuta.

Paid members across the alliance will receive benefits on every product, giving people a bundle of independent, encrypted open source tools for notes, search, email, and of course, photos.

Mo Bitar from Standard Notes

Open source and privacy veteran Mo Bitar had a heartfelt conversation with Vishnu on the podcast. From the journey to starting Standard Notes, to the sacrifices he made, the lessons he learnt, and what the future for him holds.

Here are some comments from the video

"Never heard a so honest talk from a tech podcast. It feel so human and personal. It values more than all training, book or project I ever made. Even Vishnu seems so embarrassed but at the same time so interested thinking, "my god it doesn't fit a typical tech interview what should I do?" but then listening and asking so perfectly fitting questions"

"Ditto on other comments, really refreshingly candid interview. Thank you Vishnu and Mo for sharing this."

Watch now

Vishnu has great guests lined up for upcoming episodes, so now would be a great time to subscribe to the YouTube channel.

Alright, cheers, have a great November everyone!

p.s. We made a playlist 🙂

Helping open source grow via outreach. India's top newspaper headlines Ente. Tuta joins Ente's Friends alliance. A fun lil game. A new office! A new podcast. And of course, new features and code.

Press coverage - Ente, the Open Source alternative to Google Photos

Ente volunteered to help conduct India's premier open source conference, IndiaFOSS. From the master of the ceremonies, to handling sponsors, and of course, as the official photo storage provider, we helped out with the organization of the event in various ways since we like the mission - of spreading awareness among people that open source exists and is in almost all cases a better alternative to proprietary learned helplessness.

But it was not all work! We had a ton of fun too.

Our engineers also presented talks on recent stuff we've been up to:

• Laurens Priem - The awesomeness that is Ente's ML
• Prateek Sunal - The awesomeness that is Ente's video streaming

And, yes!, our CEO was featured in a headline article in The Times of India, highlighting Ente's rise as the open source alternative to Google Photos.

Tuta joins Ente's Friends

We're so happy to announce the second member of Ente's Friends - Tuta!

Tuta joins Ente and Kagi in the Friends alliance. Ente subscribers get benefits for all the other products in the Friends network, and similarly Kagi and Tuta subscribers get Ente benefits.

We are in talks with more privacy-focused products that want to join the alliance. Exciting times ahead, stay tuned.

New office

We moved into a new, larger office!

Thank you all. It is amazing how a single person's dream has grown into this unstoppable juggernaut.

Embed Ente albums in your own site

While a lot of our time in September went into community and office logistics, we also shipped features big and small.

Last month's custom domains feature enabled you to serve your albums from your own domains, and this month's embed feature is complementary to it - Ente now supports embedding your albums in your own pages. Photos hosted in your Ente account can now show up right in your own blog posts, technical articles, portfolios etc.

You can copy the embed code from the public link settings on the web app. More details are in announcement post. The embed code option will also be available on mobile and desktop in the next release.

Share QR Code for public albums

By popular request! You can now share public links using a QR code.

Shared albums in widgets

Ente's home screen widgets now support albums that have been shared with you by your friends and family.

That's not all, there were also other quality of life improvements:

• You can now add to album directly from the photo viewer
• There is a new album-level guest view option in album options menu
• A simplified location view in photo details

Cookies vs You - consent.gg

One of our engineers made a fun little game as a weekend project. You have 30 seconds to close as many cookie banners as you can!

Technically curious folks would also like the "making of" writeup.

Get to know high impact founders

Ente's CEO, Vishnu Mohandas, started a new podcast to highlight all the amazing work happening in privacy-first products across the world.

The first episode was with the indomitable Carl Dong, founder and CEO of Obscura VPN and a Bitcoin-core contributor. Carl has an incredibly fresh energy which is lovingly infectious!

Watch now

The next episode will be with the wise Mo Bitar, the founder of Standard Notes. You can subscribe on YouTube to be notified when it is out.

Please send suggestions of who you think we should get on the podcast next!

Have a great October everyone.

300 million photos. 1 new app. 3 new features. 1 new ally.

Ente's speedrun continues.

Custom domains 🎁

You can now use your own domain when sharing.

Instead of albums.ente.io, you can now ask Ente to serve your public links from yourdomain.com. This makes sharing more personal (if you're sharing with family and friends) and professional (if you're, say, a photographer sharing with your clients).

This feature is free of cost. You don't need to run any servers, Ente will manage the infrastructure for you. Setup is super simple.

For the technically curious, our engineers also wrote a blog post describing how it works under the hood.

Similar images 🪄

Dedup on steroids. You can now use Ente's machine learning magic to find photos that are approximately similar to other photos in your library, allowing you to reclaim space by keeping only one copy.

Give it a try under Settings > Backup > Free up space.

Video streaming improvements 💪

You can now trigger stream generation manually per video. And the settings screen has been updated to show streaming details and progress.

Cast to Apple TV 📺

The long awaited Ente Apple TV cast app arrives.

Apple's walled gardens meant that Ente users using Apple TV were not able to view their albums on their family TV. Problemo no more - Ente now has an Apple TV cast app that allows you to enjoy your memories with your family on even more devices.

Search on the App store for "Ente Cast", enter the code on your TV, and let it cook.

300 Million Memories Preserved 💚

Ente crossed 300 million memories a few days ago. Every million now is happening faster than before.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Love you all.

App Icon with Ducky ✨

For celebrating the milestone, our designers couldn't resist creating a new icon for the photos app, featuring lil ducky. Find it in Settings > General > Advanced > App icon.

Your home screen, now with your favorite ducky.

PrivacyPack

Privacy socials were abuzz the last two weeks with privacypack.org, an Ente initiative to make it super easy for people to share their privacy wins.

You will find most privacy preserving alternatives already listed, and more can be added by creating a pull request - privacypack.org is completely open source and is maintained as a community guided resource.

Ente 🤝 Kagi

Announcing Friends, with Kagi as the first friend.

Ente is collaborating with other lovingly made, beautiful, and privacy respecting products to help people take back control of their digital lives. Paid users of any product get deals on all the other products in the Friends alliance.

We're already in talks with other products eager to join the alliance, and the collective benefits a user gets from the Friends network will only grow. All the benefits of comprehensive coverage, without needing to put all your eggs in the same basket.

Like the Privacy Avengers crossover you didn't expect, eh?

Take Control

Here's to a spectacular September. Have a good one y'all.