Ente Photos

Ente Photos at a glance

Ente Photos is end-to-end encrypted storage for photos and videos with apps for Android, iOS, the web and for Windows, macOS and Linux. Server and clients are open source, so organisations can either use the hosted offering or run their own instance. Administrators meet the product as privacy-friendly storage for image collections and, when self-hosting, as another service with object storage and a database behind it.

Development takes place in a shared repository that holds several applications. Releases are therefore tagged per application: photo clients, the authenticator, the command line tool and server components ship independently of each other. The cadence is high, and many builds contain smaller corrections to synchronisation, import and local processing.

When updating, the interplay deserves the most attention: self-hosters should not let server and client drift too far apart and should plan for database migrations. Mobile installations arrive through app stores while desktop packages come from the project site, so several update paths run in parallel. Before larger jumps, back up server data and test the restore path.