Despite Google’s intentions for its default image viewing and editing app for Android, the Photos app has, over the years, become one of the most popular photo backup services around. In fact, it was one of the most attractive offerings for years until it stopped offering unlimited storage in 2020.
That change in the tech giant’s strategy has left some space for other photo backup services to grow and showcase their offerings to people. Especially for people who don’t want to hand over pictures of their entire life to big tech companies, photo backup services that focus on privacy have become really attractive. That’s where Ente comes in.
An open-source project by Vishnu Mohandas, a former Google employee, Ente (which means “Mine” in Malayalam) offers end-to-end encrypted photo storage across various platforms — meaning the service cannot access its users’ photos at all. The startup says it stores photos at three different locations for better reliability and access, and the open-source nature of the project means anyone can inspect the code or even spin up their own server to store their pictures securely.
The company says all its user-facing features are processed on-device — the processing for features like identifying faces and locations, creating themes and curating memories is done locally — and the processed information is synced with other devices using end-to-end encryption. You can also use natural language to search for photos, such as “beach sunsets in India.”
The service offers a web client as well as Android, iOS and desktop apps, and comes with 5GB of free storage. Users can pay for plans starting from $9.99 per month for 1TB of storage, and can share one account with five people.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mohandas said that while he uses a lot of Google products, including Photos, the company’s privacy practices made him uncomfortable.
“Google takes security seriously, but not user privacy. They don’t really care about customer data or what implications can come from being careless about it. In hindsight, this is not surprising because they are an advertisement company,” Mohandas said. He eventually tried out Apple and Dropbox but wasn’t satisfied with their interfaces or how difficult it was to access pictures across different platforms and devices.
Ente, which is bootstrapped, claims it has over 150,000 registered customers who have collectively stored over 165 million photos on the app. Despite the traction, Mohandas says the company doesn’t yet have any ambitions to seek out venture capital.
“The cost of a company like us shutting down is really high, as all our customers would need to take off their data. We don’t want to take venture money at the moment and try and get growth in a manner that could lead us to shut down,” Mohandas said.
He said the open-source community around Ente is strong, and all its 12 employees were previously part of the community. The company also offers dedicated support for folks who want to self-host the app.
Mohandas realizes that privacy features aren’t going to be enough to sell a service like this and says that’s why Ente has tried to maintain feature parity with services like Google Photos. The startup is also considering releasing an Android app that doesn’t require users to log in and offers photo categorization features locally.
