Despite Google's intentions for the default image viewing and editing app for Android, the Photos app has become one of the most popular photo backup services for many years. In fact, it was one of the most attractive products for many years, before ceasing to offer unlimited storage in 2020.
Tech Giant's strategy changes have left space to grow other photo backup services and showcase their offerings to people. Privacy-focused photo backup services have really become attractive, especially for those who don't want to hand over their lifelong photos to major tech companies. That's where ENTE comes in.
The open source project by former Google employee Vishnu Mohandas (meaning “Mine” by Malayalam) provides end-to-end encrypted photo storage on a variety of platforms. This means that the service has no access to the user's photos at all. According to the startup, they store photos in three different locations to improve reliability and access. The open source nature of the project also allows anyone to inspect the code or spin up their servers to store photos safely.
The company handles features aimed at all users. Functions such as face and location identification, theme creation, and memory curation are handled locally. You can also use natural language to search for photos such as “Indian Beach Sunset.”
The service not only offers Android, iOS and Desktop apps, but also web clients and comes with 10GB of free storage. Users can pay for plans starting at $9.99 per month with 1TB of storage and share one account with five people.
Image credit:ENTE
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mohandas said that although he uses many Google products, including photos, the company's privacy practices made him uncomfortable.
“Google takes security seriously, but there's no privacy for its users. They don't care what it means because they're careless about customer data or what it means. In hindsight, it's not surprising because they're advertising companies,” says Mohandas. He eventually tried Apple and Dropbox, but wasn't satisfied with their interface and how difficult it was to access photos from various platforms and devices.
Image credit:ENTE
Bootstrap ENTE claims that it has more than 150,000 registered customers collectively storing more than 165 million photos on the app. Despite the traction, Mohandas says the company still has no ambitions to look for venture capital.
“The costs for companies like US closures are very high because all customers need to delete their data. At this point, we don't want to try and grow in a way that could potentially close,” Mohandas said.
He said the open source community around ENTE was strong, with all 12 employees previously being part of the community. The company also offers dedicated support to those who want to self-host the app.
Mohandas recognizes that privacy features are not sufficient to sell such services, which is why ENTE has tried to maintain feature parity with services like Google Photos. The startup is also considering releasing Android apps that don't require users to log in, and offers photo classification capabilities locally.