News

…something starting with the letter Q! From Quantum, to QR, to ‘Quite a few updates’ on Ente Photos - we have been ducking busy the last month.

First steps to post-quantum

We've deployed our first post-quantum crypto change. This vets all the moving parts in Ente's transition to quantum-secure cryptography, and what remains now is moving the rest of the PQ-affected flows, over time, to quantum security.

If you share our yum about things that are a bit geeky, check out our blog.

Ente QR

From a small internal itch, we ended up creating probably the best QR code generator in the world. No ads, no signup, no tracking. And it looks quite gorgeous, even though we do say so ourselves.

You can try it at the highly original and creatively named page qr.ente.com.

Ente Photos (Quite a few updates)

Share your whole library with family. No more sharing albums one at a time — pick a family member, tap Share albums, and everything (including everything you add later) is shared automatically. Hidden albums stay hidden.

Turn an old tablet into a photo frame. Album slideshows let you play one or more albums on a loop, with custom timing and backgrounds. Pair it with library sharing and it becomes a frame at your parents' place that updates itself.

Memories now play with music — tracks we composed ourselves. Listen at music.ente.com.

Indexing is up to 10x faster on recent iPhones and 4-5x faster on Android, with faster HEIC decoding and more reliable background syncing.

And a lot more that we just don’t have space to share. But fear not! You can check out the extended list in the blog post.

And if you want to go still deeper, there’s a changelog included with even more details 🤫

Our latest release includes a lot of improvements - big and small.

Memories

Interact with memories. We have added the ability to comment, react and kick start a conversation on shared memories. This brings your memory back into the feed of everyone you've shared them with.

Share memories. We've made it easier to select and share specific memories from the sets we curate. We've also polished the web view that's presented to your friends.

Save contacts

We've simplified the process of connecting faces with your contacts. You no longer have to look at email addresses and dummy avatars.

New photo viewer

We've revamped our photo viewer and information sheet for a cleaner experience.

Improved import

We've upgraded the upload experience on Desktop to make the process more reliable and easier to understand. We've also simplified importing from Google Photos - supporting favorites and partner shared items.

More

• Faster photo loading, with smarter cache management that consumes less space on your device.
• Improved OCR, with a more reliable interaction (just long-press to select).
• Nicer dummy avatar colors, although you really should consider connecting their faces now!
• More reliable background sync, with fixes for crashes in the background, apologies to those who were facing them.
• New changelog screen, that sparks joy!
• Polished desktop experience, with improvements to the machine learning pipeline and rendering of archived albums, file-info panel, shared file actions, add person screen, toasts and more.

What's next

We're tightening the system integration on Android, speeding up on-device machine learning, pushing towards feature parity on desktop, improving sharing with family members and designing ways to help you clean up your library - in a fun way! More on that in a few weeks.

Opening our books

Openness has always been a core value at Ente - all our products are open source. And now, our business metrics are fully open too! You can find the numbers that matter @ ente.com/open.

This page will showcase our recurring revenue, count of paid customers, count of registered users, and more. The numbers will automatically update at the start of every month.

Checkout

Vishnu’s Blog

The big news from May is the launch of Legacy Kit on Ente Locker — a way to let your loved ones, even those not on Ente, to inherit your data on Ente.

We also added a fresh coat of paint to Ente Photos, and shipped several quality-of-life improvements to Ente Auth.

Ente Photos

We've evolved our design system toward something more beautiful and relaxed. Here's what changed.

Refreshed visuals. Buttons, text fields, screen titles, icons, colours, and typography have all been updated to make the app easier on the eye.

All albums in one place. Your albums, including on-device and shared albums, now live on a single screen, listed all at once so you don’t have to tap a chevron every time to see your full collection.

Dedicated Feed tab. Replacing the old Shared Albums tab, so it's easy to see what your loved ones are sharing, reacting to, and commenting on.

Updated navigation. New icons and a less rounded look for a more premium feel.

In case you didn’t know, all of our Figma files are public. We’re now building a shared design system for Ente. It brings together common components, patterns, and design tokens used across our apps. Starting with Photos, it’s now being adopted across the Ente ecosystem. Read more.

Ente Locker

Ente Locker is for the practical parts of life: IDs, insurance papers, medical records, passwords, notes, and the documents someone may need in your absence.

Since launch, we learned that someone, without an Ente account, also needs a way to recover your Ente account if you lose access, are incapacitated, or are no longer around.

We’ve launched Legacy Kit to solve this problem.

Ente Auth

Better desktop app. Auth on Linux now unlocks with improved system authentication. It also starts up more cleanly on Linux, keeps your selected theme after unlocking, and has steadier tray icons across Linux and Windows.

Smoother to use. Newly added codes stay in view, so a search or tag filter no longer hides a code you just added. The keyboard also opens reliably for search and the app-lock password on startup.

Easier to navigate. Overflowing tag strips now scroll with the mouse wheel or a drag, and tags are reachable by keyboard — Tab to move between them, Enter or Space to select.

New icons. We added custom icons for more services. We also fixed the few that were invisible, low-contrast, or mis-coloured, and made sure they show up in the icon picker.

More languages. Updated translations for Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and Russian.

They See Your Photos

Pretty exciting to see our project ‘They See Your Photos’ featured at Le Cube Garges, as part of their Dopamine exhibition. Le Cube Garges is a major digital arts and cultural center near Paris, so if you are around, do drop in! If you are not, you can still check out the project at They See Your Photos.

We’ve shipped updates to all our products, and some more.

Ente Photos

Smoother on every device. The photo viewer now handles very high-resolution images smoothly, even on low-memory devices. Map view is faster, and the people page is more accessible.

Quicker browsing. Photos and videos load faster across the app, and shared links load faster too, with smoother animations.

Memories, instantly. Tap a memory and it's there, with new haptics. Also, memory lanes now appear for more people in your life, including kids 5 and up.

Widgets. We've polished home screen widgets. Set one up and your favorite photos will be there every time you unlock your phone.

QR Codes. Scan QR codes inside the app, and find them from the search section.

Give 10 GB, get 10 GB. Reminder that you get 10 GB free for referring a friend. They will get 10 GB too. Here is how.

Ente Locker

Share collections. Share whole collections as links. End-to-end encrypted, like everything else.

Offline access. Keep important items available offline. Airplane mode, dead zones, no network — your documents are still there.

Locker on Web. Locker's beta is live at locker.ente.com. Try it and tell us what you think!

Ente Auth

Continuous backups. Auth can keep a copy of your data on your device, updated every time you add a code. No lock-ins, ever.

Import from Proton and more. Bring your codes over from wherever you are today.

Icon picker. In case you missed it, you can choose your app icon from Settings.

New game at ente.com/404

Have fun. Dash around as Ente’s Ducky on our 404 page. Can you beat the high score?

This one's big. Let's get into it.

Memory Lane

See how you and your loved ones have changed over the years. Open anyone's page from the Search tab and watch time unfold.

Share the experience with a link — everything end-to-end encrypted.

Share Memories

Stumbled upon a memory with a friend? Share it as a link — they'll see exactly what you see, right in their browser. No app, no account needed.

Local First

You can now use Ente Photos without signing up.

Face recognition, search and memories — all working on your local gallery, no account needed. This is our first step toward a great offline experience, with a lot more planned.

Feed

Keeping up with your family is easy with our new Feed. View, like and comment — all from one place.

If you've been thinking about getting your family onto Ente, this is a great time!

App Lock

The most requested feature on the desktop is here.

Ente Photos can auto-lock, and you can unlock it with a PIN, password or biometrics.

Family Plans

Share your subscription with 5 family members.

Configure how much storage each person can use — all from a new, simple interface.

and more

We've also added a bunch of under the hood improvements to all platforms.

• Public links now load way faster — 80% reduction in initial payload
• QR code detection
• Better text recognition
• Faster on-device ML processing
• Resumable ML model downloads
• Redesigned help & support — easier to find answers, easier to reach us
• Various bug fixes and stability improvements

Ask Us Anything!

We sat down to answer 50+ questions from the community — from product direction to behind-the-scenes decisions. Watch here.

Hackathon

We hosted Ente's second hackathon last weekend.

The team built 11 toys — from a tool that splits secrets into recovery cards to a game where Ducky outruns a T-Rex. Check them all out.

ente‌.com

We are now @ ente.com.

After years on ente‌.io, we have our four-letter .com — a more permanent address for a company built to outlast its creators.

Vishnu spoke with Mozilla leadership

Mozilla announced Firefox would become an “AI browser,” and the response was critical. Users pushed back, Mozilla clarified, and the conversation got heated.

Vishnu sat down with Raffi (CTO, Mozilla) and John (CEO, Mozilla.ai) to get answers. Watch here.

Like usual, Ente shipped a lot.

Beautiful Links

Shared albums now look stunning with a new waterfall layout.

Also choose between grouped and trip layouts - perfect for vacation pics.

Quick Links

Share photos without creating an album first. Select, share, done.

Links to single photos and videos open in a full viewer.

Legacy for Photos

We brought the best of Locker to Photos.

Now assign a trusted contact to receive your memories after a configurable time - 7, 14, or 30 days.

Faster Search

We revamped our search engine to show results instantly.

Faces, search, discovery - everything is instant!

Hidden Photos

Hide photos, videos, and even shared albums.

Easily clear hidden files from your device - so they’re hidden from everywhere.

and more

There’s a lot more - improvements to face management, new sign-up screens (with new duckies!), new collage layouts, search within device albums, smoother live photo playback, album covers on desktop, new translations (Hola!), and more.

We also fixed a bunch of bugs you reported - iPad window controls, iOS video player hiccups, file picker on wide screens, and a few others.

500 million memories!

500,000,000 memories have been preserved on Ente.

Thank you for the trust!

psst. We built a new way to share notes and secrets privately: paste.ente.com

January was a big month for Ente - with new features and major improvements on every platform - not just for you, but your family too!

Like & Comment

You can now like and comment on shared photos.

Even better, anyone you share an album link with can like and comment - without an Ente account!

Album Management

Managing shared albums is now easier with the new Admin role. Admins can:

• Add other viewers and collaborators
• Manage comments
• Remove photos
• Suggest deletion of unwanted photos

Download Albums as ZIPs

Now download entire albums as ZIP files on desktop and public album links.

This makes downloads easier, faster, and gives you one more reason to share Ente's album links.

Redesigned Settings

We’ve completely redesigned the Settings screen on mobile, and you can search to quickly find what you're looking for.

This is the first step in improving our design language - fresh pixels to follow!

Quality of Life Improvements

Brace yourself.

On mobile, we shipped major search upgrades:

• Faster loading
• Redesigned results screen
• Direct search within Discovery, Locations, and File Type pages
• Search bar moved to the top

Face management is better too:

• Sorting and search are now supported
• A separate page for ignored people
• Easier face merging

And more:

• Pinch to zoom in videos
• Previews for unsupported formats now render in photo view
• Improved collage maker, with easy swapping

On desktop, we’ve added several improvements to make organization easier:

• Hide shared albums
• Sort album lists while uploading, adding, or moving photos
• Select all photos in album and gallery views
• More sorting options for the main album list
• Upload directly to hidden albums

Plus:

• New context menu for photos
• Option to clean up uncategorized photos
• Edit a photo’s location directly in the desktop app

Some teams move in quarters, team Ente moves in weeks 😎

Here are the full release notes.

FOSDEM 2026

Anand and Laurens were in Brussels last weekend for FOSDEM 2026. They had a great time meeting many of you - and giving away a lot of free merch!

For behind-the-scenes updates on how we’re building Ente, follow our YouTube channel.

Happy new year!

Let's start with something that'll be useful right away.

Rituals

Learn good habits by tracking your rituals.

Get fit. Eat better. Capture kids growing up.

With full privacy inside Ente Photos.

Free links

Everyone - even free users - can now share links to their albums.

These links are end-to-end encrypted, but anyone you share links with can view your albums. They don't need an Ente app or account.

Free links also means:

• Custom domains for albums, are now free
• Album embeds for your websites, are now free
• Trip layouts, are now free

Map view

Watch all your photos laid out on a world map, on the big screen!

Explore the places you've been, and the places yet to be.

and more (duh)

You can tag people manually in photos, pin your favorite people to the top, hide those you don't care about, pin shared albums, and play with a new icon for favorites 🌟

What's next?

We've so much lined up for this year that we can't wait to show you. In fact, our next update will be the best update ever.

This will be the best year for Ente - and you!

Techlore

We just spoke to Henry from Techlore - about privacy, freedom and more.

Unveiling Ente Locker. New features for Photos and Auth. Grant from FLOSS/fund. Podcast with Kagi's founder. And more!

FLOSS/fund grants Ente

FLOSS/fund was set up to support impactful open-source projects with grants every year. Ente has just received a $25,000 grant from this initiative.

FFmpeg, Blender, and OpenStreetMap are some of the other grantees we are sharing the stage with.

Auth gets a revamp

You can now select multiple codes and take bulk actions in one go.

We have also added the ability to scan new codes from your gallery, set up automatic on-device exports for your codes, a quick settings tile for Android, and a better sort experience.

Photos on desktop gets some love

Shortcut to search is now available - to quickly find your photos, videos, and even in-app settings.

We've also added more improvements - you can pin your favorite people, view and terminate app sessions, organize photos while viewing them, and last but not the least - now the app speaks Greek!

Photos on mobile also gets love

You can jump to the date a photo was clicked, to revisit other moments from the same day - useful while browsing the memories Ente curated for you.

That's not all. We've made our video editor faster, added OCR support for HEIC photos, and improved the experience while merging faces.

And there's more!

You get 2025 Rewind!

We've put a lot of thought into wrapping your best moments from 2025 into a highlight reel. Check out the mobile app to recap your best moments, your favorite people, your beloved spots and a lot more!

Ente Rewind will be available for everyone starting this weekend.

Vishnu's Podcast with Kagi's CEO

Ente's CEO Vishnu caught up with Kagi's CEO Vlad to discuss search, privacy, and their vision for a more humane web.

Subscribe on YouTube to support founders making the internet a safer place.

Locker enters beta

Many of us at Ente have a few important documents we access often and want our loved ones to have if something happens to us. When we spoke to our parents, partners, and friends, we found they felt the same.

Ente Locker is our answer - a safe place to store and share your most important information: documents, passwords, notes, and more.

The beta is now live on our Discord. Try out Locker and tell us what you think.

Thank you for making our 2025 amazing, we have a bunch of goodies lined up for 2026. See you next year!!

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.