Can This Private Open Source Alternative Replace Google Photos

For many people, Google Photos has taken the stress out of managing photos. Every photo they snap is automatically uploaded to the web. Yet, as a Google service, the app comes with many privacy concerns. There's room for an app to offer a similar service without privacy concerns—"Ente" might be that replacement.

What Is Ente?

Ente is a photo and video gallery app that backs up your photos online, except it does so privately and securely. It's to Google Photos what ProtonMail is to Gmail. Both Ente and Proton offer apps that help us continue using our phones the way we expect, with a greater degree of privacy and without the steep learning curve that usually comes from implementing more technical privacy solutions. Sadly, the vast majority of ways to safeguard your privacy and security on the web qualify as more technical. Ente is part of a growing wave of apps stepping in to offer easy-to-use alternatives.

Ente's financial model is pretty straightforward. You can get a monthly plan ranging from free (1GB) to $20 (2TB) or annual plans topping out at $200, providing you with a discount equivalent to getting two months for free. Family plans are also available.

Why Use Ente Over Google Photos?

When we speak of an app as an alternative, it's easy to think of it as an also-ran or a copycat. In this case, that's still true, but what makes Ente worth using are things Google Photos does not and, without a big shift in company culture, cannot deliver.

Ente Is Fully Open Source

Every line of code in the Ente app is open source. That means technical people are free to verify what it is doing or make any changes they wish. Someone can even use the app as a jumping-off point to build a comparable alternative. Open source software is shared knowledge, like science.

As an open-source app, Ente is available for download from F-Droid, an app store for free and open-source Android apps, in addition to the Play Store.

The code running on Ente's servers is also open source. This goes a step further than Proton, which releases open-source apps but runs proprietary code on its servers. With Ente, the entire loop can be audited, studied, or copied.

Ente Is End-to-End Encrypted

End-to-end encryption is what keeps the photos and videos you store using Ente actually private. Each image is encrypted on your device before being uploaded to Ente's servers, where the files are stored in their encrypted state. The files remain encrypted as they travel from your device to Ente, which is why the encryption is described as end-to-end.

Ente, the company, doesn't have access to the key needed to decrypt your images. That means it can't scan your images to fund ever more ways to advertise to you. But this is also a big part of the reason Ente can't quite compete with Google Photos on the features many people love. More on that later.

Does Ente Actually Work?

That's the most important question, and the short answer is yes. Here's what it can do.

Ente Automatically Backs Up Photos and Videos

Like Google Photos, backing up your snapshots is a core part of what Ente does. It provides a place to store your images and video recordings, so you don't lose them all if you drop your phone.

Ente isn't limited to one folder. You can select whichever folders on your device contain images. Default options include your Camera and Pictures folder, but if you have album art lying around in your music folders, Ente will detect those, too. You'll probably want to leave them unchecked.

After your initial setup, you can close the app. You're free to ignore Ente from this point on if all you're after is the peace of mind that comes from having a backup. From my experience over the past several months, the app does a good job of running reliably in the background.

Another core reason to use Ente is to make images accessible from multiple devices, such as a PC and a tablet. To that end, there are mobile apps available for both Android and Apple devices, along with a desktop client for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

You Can Easily Share Your Photos and Videos

It's no secret that sharing photos between Android and iPhone users can be a pain. Even exchanging images between people who use the same type of phone can be a challenge, especially when working with large video files. That's why a big perk of cloud storage is the ability to share data with others easily.

Sharing files between two Ente users is seamless. Add both users to the same folder, and images will appear on both of their devices. Except, let's face it, most people are not Ente users. So, for them, you generate a public link that you can share with anyone. If you've used Dropbox, Google Photos, or basically any cloud storage with photo backup, then you know the deal. It works as you would expect.

Ente Is a Basic Gallery App

You can use Ente as a replacement for your phone's default gallery app, too. It can display images you've recently shot with your camera in addition to images saved in folders elsewhere. There is a built-in editor for basic tweaks, such as rotating a photo or making it brighter. You can edit metadata and add hashtags to photos to easily search for them later.

Where Ente Falls Short

Unfortunately, I can't just say that anyone using Google Photos will be happy using Ente. A lot of what many people love about the many features of Google Photos is the secret sauce that is easier to apply when you have as much data as Google does. It's the ability to type in a search and have Google Photos pull up exactly what you're looking for. You can type in "dog" and have it find any picture of a dog you've ever taken. You can even use Google Photos to search through the text of your handwritten notes since the service has OCR built-in. Type "red" and Google will show you pictures that are red.

In positive news, Ente is experimenting with adding this type of functionality. There's an advanced option tucked away to enable "magic search" using on-device machine learning. This approach is more private since the Ente app can analyze images only after they've been decrypted on your end.

Yet, for now, Ente's experimental machine learning can't hold a candle to what Google and server-side machine learning are able to do. Your device isn't as powerful as a server farm, and there isn't as much money to be made by keeping users' data privately tucked away on their own devices.

As it is, Ente functions instead like a traditional photo manager. You must manually create your own hashtags and tag your images in order to search for such parameters later. It requires a level of commitment photo enthusiasts are accustomed to, but apps like Google Photos removed the need for.

Even as a basic gallery app, Ente has far fewer features than something like Samsung Gallery, which is why I stick to my phone's default gallery app and rely on Ente just for its backup capabilities. The Ente app doesn't allow you to create folders or move images around. You have to fall back to a file manager or another gallery app for that.

You're also probably going to want a separate editor. Ente's built-in editor can't remotely compete with the kind of AI-powered edits Google Photos can do.

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How much you appreciate Ente depends primarily on how heavily privacy and security concerns weigh on you. Data collection bothers me to the point where I don't use features like Google's Circle to Search because it only pulls up results from Google, and I prefer to use a more private search engine. If the thought of what Google's using your images for doesn't already prevent you from using Google Photos in the first place, then Ente probably won't entice you to switch. But if you are looking for the most viable privacy-respecting alternative, Ente is your best bet.

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