Protect your photos and videos with Ente - a secure, cross-platform, open source, encrypted photos app. Automatic backups, end-to-end encryption, collaborative albums, family plans, library-sync, 1-click import, human support, locked photos, live photos, descriptions, private sharing, search and mor...
I'm looking for something that can replace Google Photos. I found out about Ente through F-Droid, and based on what I see on their website, it appears to be a good alternative. I'm not looking for anything special. Just something that will allow me to backup and sync my photos across devices.
Does anyone here have experience with Ente? If so, can you please tell me the pros and cons?
They have a free level, so you can just sign up and try it out.
I would say the main thing that I noticed different from other services is that the end to end encryption means you can't stream videos. So when you're browsing your family videos, it has to download the whole video before it will play. This will leave you waiting a few seconds or more compared to big tech non-encrypted video playing which will stream so will start faster.
Other than that, they seem good-intentioned, they have been around a while, their product seems high quality, and if I wasn't self hosting I'd probably use them.
Though I do have questions about their other product, a cloud-synced 2FA. I might be missing something but if I can log in to their website to see my 2FA codes then it doesn't seem very 2FA.
The pricing seems realistic, about 2x of wasabi s3 storage wise, but I assume they also do some server side processing like search features and format conversions, so seems okay.
I have been using Ente for a couple of years and have been very satisfied. It has been improving rapidly as well. It was a little rough at the start, but is currently reliable and easy to use. I definitely recommend giving Ente a try. As someone else mentioned, videos aren't able to play immediately if they aren't already cached locally. And while search is improving, it is still far behind Google Photos.