Embeddings (and other derived metadata) will sync across all your devices e2ee. So you could use our desktop app[1] to import and index your existing library. Newer photos will get indexed during upload on respective clients.
Search is yet to be implemented on web and indexing is turned off by default on devices with < 4gb of RAM. You can opt-in from Settings > General > Advanced > Machine learning.
I can’t see any evidence of encryption on their front page. I can see evidence of storing your data in multiple third party clouds (this is advertised as a feature, data redundancy).
Wow, 1TB of photos? This is just astonishing to me. What is the use of so many images? As an ex semi-pro photographer, one of the things I realized is that what makes photographs special to people, even family photographs, is the rarity of them.
So I just cannot understand taking and holding on to this many images. I would find just managing the images would take away time and money from my family.
A combination of taking photos for just any purpose (from memos to remember posters, events, or even store prices, to notes) for 2 decades now, enough interest in photography to have played with raw for while and still keep a bunch of them for my favorites, to our kid happening, and a lot of traveling around, which meant additional deluges of pictures.
Google Photos makes it a no-brainer to manage, which largely contributed to the size inflation (which is also why searching and indexing have become critical to us)
PS: I declared bankruptcy on photo management a long time ago. Reducing my library to a decent size is totally possible but would take months of sifting through near duplicates.
For me the problem is that I'm not a great photographer. I take loads of bad photos. It would take me far too much time to go through all of them and decide which ones to keep.
Also, my wife and I sometimes look at old photos for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the photo or even with reminiscing. Instead, we may look for some specific fact (mole, dental issue, dress, haircut, domestic repairs, flooded footpaths, etc). The more photos we keep, the more likely it is that we can find what we're looking for.
In this day and age, dealing with that amount of data even to archival standards may well be cheaper than you’d rate your labor to sort all the wheat from the chaff…
Thanks. I would gladly take away the "convenience of AI search" for the privacy that your service provides.
I used Ente once, and it was great, but I am poor, so I just store my images locally now. Not that your service is expensive or not worth it because I think it is.
I work on a similar product, and honestly the AI parts dont really matter wrt privacy. Its uninteresting. The EXIF information is way more private and useful, but exif data is also what makes the product usable. If you strip exif, you might as well chuck all your photos in a single folder and call it a day. We also dont sell your data to anyone and we dont run analysis on your data
Ente has reasonably good search[1] powered by on-device machine learning[2].
[1]: https://ente.io/blog/machine-learning
[2]: https://ente.io/ml