For open-source and self-hosted enthusiasts, Ente might not be a name you’ve heard before. That’s completely okay, so let’s take a moment to introduce what it is.
It is a secure, cloud-based, encrypted photos app designed to protect your photos and videos. Ente offers end-to-end encryption, automatic backups, collaborative albums, library sync, 1-click import, locked photos, private sharing, and more.
The app aims to be a privacy-friendly alternative to big tech photo storage services like Google Photos or iCloud Photos for organizing and backing up your memories, ensuring that they are stored in a way only you can view them.
And here’s the big news. On March 1, 2024, the company announced that it had completed its journey towards becoming fully open source. This means that alongside its already open-source clients, Ente’s server code is now accessible to everyone on GitHub.
Users can now access a full stack of tools, including mobile, web, and desktop clients, the server, and even a command line interface. This means you get a full set of apps designed to give you total control over all your photos and videos.
Put simply, you’re getting the same technology the company offers in its paid cloud service, which has been tested and trusted with millions of customers’ photos and videos. The company believes this will be particularly useful for many individuals, from curious future founders to self-hosting enthusiasts. And we completely agree with this statement.
With this move, Ente stepped into territory that was mostly dominated by two top-notch open-source solutions, Immich and PhotoPrism. If we can do a quick comparison, Ente needs to catch up due to the lack of built-in machine-learning capabilities that allow additional functionalities such as automatically identifying objects and places, face recognition, similarity detection, advanced search capabilities, and more.
On the other hand, however, Ente provides something significant – complete end-to-end encryption. This means only you can access and see your digital memories.
In any case, the next few months promise to be thrilling. Self-hosting enthusiasts are already buzzing and can’t wait to dive into this fresh solution to test its capabilities.
We’re also really happy about Ente’s choice to make their app open source. We believe this move will seriously boost how well-known and widely used the app becomes, reaching loads of users out there.
For further details, check out Ente’s official announcement. You can also find the source code on the project’s GitHub page, which is now available to the public.
