Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

ente.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 331 posts

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#241

Post by Systemling0815 »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #143
tjoff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is great :) I will look into it, from a first glance collaboration seems to only be on a per album basis? Can you have nested albums? For a group of friends / family you'd probably want many tens of albums tracking different trips/events etc.

We don't support nested albums, yet. Thanks for sharing your use case, will figure out how to best solve for it. (Right now a "stream" of photos within a feed sounds like simpler UX than nested-albums, but will think more)

[dead]

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#242

Post by vishnumohandas »

stockhorn wrote: post #233
vishnumohandas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for checking us out! We currently keep 2 versions of a photo - one the original, and the other a downscaled copy to be rendered as the thumbnail. Unlike non-e2ee providers, we cannot transcode and serve optimised images on the fly, when it's faster to downscale than serve the original image over network. What we could do is 1. Intelligently preload original photos when their thumbnails are in scope 2. Store an…

Ah this totally makes sense! Do you use progressive JPEGs already when opening the full image? If only there was a progressive encoding which lets you get a perfectly downscaled (not blurry) version of an image by just reading parts of the file.

TIL about progressive JPEGs, will check it out, thanks!

We currently render the thumbnail first (in most cases it's available locally) and then replace it with the original image once fetched from remote, while replicating the zoom and pan operations (if any) performed by the user. So it is "progressive" in some sense, but goes from something like 20% to 100% in one shot.

("20%" is a simplification, the actual value will depend on the resolution of the original image and that of the generated thumbnail, the latter is fixed)

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#243

Post by vitus »

darkwater wrote: post #221
vitus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It's possible to stagger your replacements so as to avoid bad batches, or even to buy from different vendors for additional diversity (although for SSDs you have much more divergent performance characteristics), but when you're talking about rotating disks one at a time that's a lot of non-negligible overhead. Depending on how much data you have to archive and frequency of access, it may very well be worth the…

Yes, but Glacier won't let you and your family browse easily and nicely photos and video safely stored, as Immich (or similars) does. It's a mix of Capex+opex+user experience+freedom of choice. And yes, my wife regularly looks at photos from 3,4,5 years ago, or older.

Which is why I mentioned frequency of access. For backup purposes, archival storage might be good enough, but if you're looking for an alternative for frequently accessed content (along the vein of whatever Google Photos replacement) then most clouds will charge you at least an order of magnitude more (even Backblaze would use most of the entire proposed capex budget within a year).

But you might still have some value in using Glacier for archival purposes and having somewhat less resilient local copies (e.g. only being able to tolerate a single disk failure, or even just JBOD).

Either way, your current approach clearly works for your circumstances, even though it'd be too fiddly for me personally.

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#244

Post by megak1d »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #218
fifafu wrote: post #215

On the website Ente mentions the AI features are not yet ready and can not be used on phones yet. Is there an approximate timeframe on when they will be usable (on Desktop & Phone and if possible even shared in a family)? I use the search & face recognition on Google Photos a lot. Once that works on Ente, I‘ll try to switch :-) I‘m absolutely fine with having the ML run on my Desktop as long as it syncs to the phone…

Semantic search is ready. Face recognition should be ready by Q3 2024.

I would love this paired with sharing photos of certain faces in (eg our children with my wife). Perhaps a dynamic album (with a list of faces) that I could then share.

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#245

Post by vishnumohandas »

megak1d wrote: post #244
vishnumohandas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantic search is ready. Face recognition should be ready by Q3 2024.

I would love this paired with sharing photos of certain faces in (eg our children with my wife). Perhaps a dynamic album (with a list of faces) that I could then share.

This is on the cards. Thanks for reinforcing the importance :)

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#246

Post by mnvrth »

afro88 wrote: post #217
mnvrth wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the app does iOS background sync. Many of us (I'm part of the Ente team) are avid users and have a huge photo libraries, and day-to-day, it works seamlessly. We don't need to reopen for it to sync etc. The only time one needs special care is when doing the initial import - at that time, we sometimes need to keep the app running in the foreground for the initial sync to complete. As the other commenters are menti…

I don't understand how this can possibly work within the constraints of iOS, and I've done some digging in the code. Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app? Apple go to great lengths to make sure the user has to use the app before it allows "budget" for background processes to execute within. My guess is that as part of the Ente team,…

> Anyone else find where they are doing anything iOS specific to enable background uploads when you don't ever open the app?

Search for "SyncService.instance.sync" in the code, that's what gets triggered.

The trigger is us sending periodic silent pushes to wake up the app.

> My guess is that as part of the Ente team, you open the app semi regularly, which is enough for the device to give some budget for your cloud sync process to kick off in the background every now and then.

I know what you think, but that's really not the case :) Many our customers are on iOS, they're satisfied with it. There are areas to improve yes - the initial import is the major pain, esp because it is also the customer's first interaction with the app - but the background sync itself is works seamlessly in practice.

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#247

Post by onethumb »

raj2569 wrote: post #169
vishnumohandas wrote: post #32

Hey, Ente's CEO here. We had opensourced our server[1] yesterday, which is perhaps why we are on the front page. Stoked to be here Ente had launched on HN[2] a while ago and has been sustainably growing since. We took the feedback from our Show HN seriously and have since - undergone a cryptography audit [3] - published our replication strategy [4] - added requested features (family plans, collaborative albums and li…

Do you have an import from smugmug? I have been a smugmug user for about 19 years and finally thinking of moving on...

Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek from SmugMug here. Love to know why you're thinking of moving on. :)

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#248

Post by alisonatwork »

marwis wrote: post #222
ValentineC wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OneDrive ceased to be a good backup alternative when they stripped GPS from all my photos 1-2 years ago. This is scary. Isn't OneDrive supposed to keep files bit-identical? Or were you using their iOS/Android apps to back up photos, and some bug caused the photos to be backed up without their metadata?

Yes, it is. Although seems only limited to Camera Roll folder. Perhaps this is why Samsung Camera built-in OneDrive integration uses different folder. Their mobile app is now stripping GPS on upload while files uploaded from desktop are unaffected. However the files I already had uploaded going back to 2017 were stripped. No idea if this was done server side or by the mobile client but the end effect is the same. Unl…

I haven't seen this behavior. All of my photos synced from Android to OneDrive have GPS data, as expected. I just checked a few from 2017 (Windows Phone) and 2018 (Android) and still there too. Did you see the same behavior on all your devices?

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#249

Post by kn100 »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #32

Hey, Ente's CEO here. We had opensourced our server[1] yesterday, which is perhaps why we are on the front page. Stoked to be here Ente had launched on HN[2] a while ago and has been sustainably growing since. We took the feedback from our Show HN seriously and have since - undergone a cryptography audit [3] - published our replication strategy [4] - added requested features (family plans, collaborative albums and li…

Hey! I wanted to ask you something.

So, I am traditionally somebody who self hosts a lot of stuff. I am not allergic to paying a fee to have something hosted by someone else - but one of my conditions to doing this is that there is an easy way to migrate away from the cloud offering should I choose to in the future.

To give an example, I use Tailscale HEAVILY right across all my self hosted stuff. It is absolutely central to everything I do - and I'd find it very hard to live without it. I am totally comfortable with this because Headscale exists, which is an open source implementation of Tailscale. If for some reason Tailscale starts making decisions I don't like, or perhaps the pricing changes in a way I am not a fan of, I have the option of trading some convenience.

I am really happy to see your server is open source. That is amazing news, and makes me feel a lot more interested in your product. I wanted to ask a few questions though:

* Let's say I've signed up with your service, and am hosting a bunch of stuff with you. I decide after 6 months I don't like some changes to the pricing model or something. How does one get their data out of the `cloud` ente.io - and into a self hosted instance of the server? Is there any data loss during this process?

* Your clients are not open source. I totally understand this. Do they however support talking to a different backend (like for example a self hosted Ente instance)?

* And finally - how would you say your tool compares to the two main open source Google Photos replacements, Immich and Photoprism?

Re: Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

#250

Post by vishnumohandas »

kn100 wrote: post #249
vishnumohandas wrote: post #32

Hey, Ente's CEO here. We had opensourced our server[1] yesterday, which is perhaps why we are on the front page. Stoked to be here Ente had launched on HN[2] a while ago and has been sustainably growing since. We took the feedback from our Show HN seriously and have since - undergone a cryptography audit [3] - published our replication strategy [4] - added requested features (family plans, collaborative albums and li…

Hey! I wanted to ask you something. So, I am traditionally somebody who self hosts a lot of stuff. I am not allergic to paying a fee to have something hosted by someone else - but one of my conditions to doing this is that there is an easy way to migrate away from the cloud offering should I choose to in the future. To give an example, I use Tailscale HEAVILY right across all my self hosted stuff. It is absolutely ce…

Hey!

> data out

You can use our Desktop app[1] or CLI[2] to export your data, incrementally. There's a toggle within our Desktop app that will perform this operation continuously into a directory of your choosing. You can of course script the CLI however you'd like.

There is no data-loss, you export what you import.

> clients are not open source

Our clients have always been open source. You can find them within our monorepo here[3].

Currently you have to pass a flag at build time to configure the endpoint, but there's a discussion[4] to add an option in-app instead.

> Immich and Photoprism

Ente comes with e2ee[5] and replication strategies[6]. The former means that we've to run ML on the Edge, while Immich and Photoprism can run ML on their servers. If your primary use case is self-hosting, Immich is the more "intelligent" option. If you value convenience, Ente is the one.

[1]: https://ente.io/downloads/desktop

[2]: https://github.com/ente-io/cli

[3]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

[4]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504

[5]: https://ente.io/architecture

[6]: https://ente.io/reliability

Post reply on HN