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Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos. We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps t
by vishnumohandas 5y ago
Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.
We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files. Apart from cross-device sync, you can share your albums end-to-end encrypted, and filter photos by location and time.
We recently had a "successful" launch on r/degoogle[3]. We wanted to Show HN after incorporating the feedback we received from there, but since OP asked, I thought I’ll drop a comment here.
If you’ve any questions, please ask.
[1]: https://ente.io https://ente.io
[2]: https://github.com/ente-io https://github.com/ente-io
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...
- iamthepieman 5y ago180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoMore than scale, it was trust and reliability that I wanted to show. Of these, I feel that scale is the simpler problem to solve.
- 0xdky 5y agoEspecially with a stateless service like a photo hosting service, this is very true. Wish you all the best!
- jshmrsn 5y agoEverything has to start somewhere.
- totoglazer 5y agoI’m at 93k myself…
- mavhc 5y agoI have 180,000 photos in Google Photos
- raybb 5y agoWhat's your strategy to get enough users so that you become financially sustainable?
- vishnumohandas 5y agoThe current set of paid users are sufficient to break-even on the infrastructure costs. As for personnel costs, a few more hundred paying users and we'll be set. Feedback from existing users have been positive, and we should be able to reach that point by end of the year. It helps that we're living in one of the cheaper parts of the globe, and are not motivated by money. We're building this because an easy to use, privacy friendly alternative needs to exist.
- sverhagen 5y ago> not motivated by money Ummm, could you elaborate on this? It sounds great but it's at the same time so foreign to me...
- speedgoose 5y agoI am not them but I know a lot of people who are not motivated by money. I guess they need and want enough money to happily live and work in good conditions, but not more, and they do not seek to become the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
- orangepanda 5y agoRight. But you need money to pay for infrastructure and employees. "not motivated by money" sounds very much like "we'll be shutting down in 2 years"
- vishnumohandas 5y agoHey, our infrastructure is already being paid for by existing users. Our pricing plans are designed such that you cover your own storage + bandwidth costs, and then some more. We don’t have a "forever-free" plan, and don’t intend to have one. And the compute requirements for a product like this are low (since most of the computation happens on the client). So currently what we need money for is employees (engineers) and not infrastructure.
- ludjer 5y agoAre there any plans to add search and automatic image tagging ?
- vishnumohandas 5y agoOur web app[1] lets you search by time ("last week", "April 14", ...) and location ("New York"). Tagging faces and objects is on our roadmap, we will ship it. [1]: https://web.ente.io https://web.ente.io
- choward 5y agoI can't tell if this is self hosted or not. All I see is a centralized option. If not self hostable, a user still can't guarantee that this doesn't just end up being as bad as google photos. There are plenty of companies like this that provide an alternative to the mainstream then sell out. Really, the only person you can trust is yourself at the end of the day.
- sp332 5y agoDown in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".
- Aeolun 5y agoThat seems counterintuitive.
- vanous 5y agoAs long as the server is closed source, this remains in the 'nice but do not touch' territory.
- _fs 5y agoAKA we want to lock you in to our PAAS
- egeozcan 5y agoIt looks like they only open sourced the clients, not the backend. Also the phrase "ente has an open architecture and source code that has been peer reviewed" that can be found on their website follows a dark pattern: hey, look we are open but not really.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoHey, I'm sorry that it came across that way. Thanks for pointing it out, I now see the lack of clarity. I've updated the copy to better reflect the situation.
- nindalf 5y agoAs a user of ente, I can say I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t have all the features that Google has but they’ve made a promising start. If the search feature becomes comparable, I’d move off Google photos permanently.
- bgdam 5y agoCan the search feature of ente become comparable to Google Photos? AFAIK, ente does E2E encryption, which means that unless they index the EXIF data on each single device, and also run the image recognition algorithms on device, the search is never going to be comparable to Google Photos.
- lazydud 5y agoI can't live without the face / object detection. It's been so useful
- anaganisk 5y agoIf they're extracting a the fingerprints what privacy are you expecting? A pinky promise that says, we won't read your data? That would long as long is its bought by Facebook/google. Remember pinky promises made by gazillion startups?
- siddharthgoel88 5y agoDoes this service encourages user outside EU? What about latency concerns for people who are not based in EU? I saw on that website that the servers are hosted in EU, and say I need to use it in Asia will have service have usable latency?
- vishnumohandas 5y agoHey, some of our users (and us) are based out of Asia, and have not observed latency to be an issue. We are currently tunneling our data over Cloudflare, and that helps quite a bit. If you find observable latency within the service, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io. I will see what we can do.
- kingosticks 5y agoI got and email about this few weeks back (I must have signed up to the list at some point) but I was put off by two things. > We've already preserved 100,000+ files, and are quite reliable at this point. "quite reliable" doesn't cut it for a paid service for me, even a new one. My second issue, and I might be wrong about this, is that there's no way to share photos with someone who isn't a (paying) ente user.
- vishnumohandas 5y ago> "quite reliable" As an engineer, I shy away from using superlatives. But sorry, I now understand that this could have been phrased better. Thank you for pointing it out. > no way to share photos Correction, the receiver can be on the free plan.
- quaintdev 5y agoI am guessing he is expecting to share pics with users who did not sign up. It maybe a one time thing. But I think you need user logged in because of encryption.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoThat’s right. We could generate public URLs that contain the decryption key of the album within the URL fragment. But as an encrypted storage provider, we would like to ship this only after we're reasonably confident that there are checks in place to prevent abuse.
- kingosticks 5y agoYes, this is what I meant and the solution you describe is what I'd be looking for. So +1 from me!
- spuz 5y agoente looks interesting to me, but I would like to have the feature to share an album with anyone who has the link. I guess that is not so easy to do though as it would require creating a decrypted copy of the photos in the album that you wish to share which would take extra time and space.
- WhyNotHugo 5y agoThis looks pretty neat, I wonder how I've been missing it so far. Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoThe API is public, but the documentation needs work. If your current use case is only to sync your uploaded files to a local folder, we have an Electron app that does just that: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3 https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3
- WhyNotHugo 5y agoThanks! Any reference to the API, even if it's just incomplete docs? An electron app seems like a huge overkill for something so simple (have you considered just a simple cli instead?).
- vishnumohandas 5y agoThe API doc is incomplete and outdated, and I'm embarrassed to share it in its current state. I will update this thread once it is presentable. The Electron app is indeed an over kill (hence the repo-name "bhari", meaning overweight). But it made it easy for us to reuse stable code that performed authentication, decryption, data-sync, etc. Also, we did not want to commit to the overhead of maintaining another stack (say a CLI or a native app) at a point where the value it would provide to a customer was unclear.
- tealpod 5y agoProduct looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos. Feedback: You can improve your website looks. Goodluck
- vishnumohandas 5y agoThank you! Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.
- rubyfan 5y agoWhat is the design target for this service? Is it the technophile who is trying to degoogle, is it some other specific design target or perhaps more general audience? If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough. You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google). I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.
- jasim 5y agoKudos to the name! The meaning ("ente" = "mine" in Malayalam) meshes deeply with what the service is, and it is short and easy for everyone to pronounce.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoGlad you like it. :)
- llampx 5y agoIt means duck in German.
- Solocomplex 5y agoWhy is every string in all lowercase? It reminds me of tumblr..
- vishnumohandas 5y agoWe thought it looked playful, friendly that way, and less like a boring archival-solution. We liked that persona.
- dbmnt 5y ago> We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files. Is that the total number of files on your platform? Not to be rude, but is this supposed to be impressive or reassuring? My photo collection is approaching half that number, and I'm just one person, so now I'm feeling completely underwhelmed by the claim.
- vishnumohandas 5y agoI felt that having replicated 200k files without failures is an indicator of reliability (not scale). But you're right, the number is minuscule compared to where we are hoping to be. We're just getting started and I'm hopeful that we will 10x this number in the next few months.