Comment by IshKebab
1 year ago
This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!
1 year ago
This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!
Hey, one of the folks working on the said photo service here.
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
Thanks for the clarification.
My family library is around 1Tb, the weakest device is an iPhone SE, and the most used access is through a web browser.
Does on-device machine learning (provided you're syncing inter-device) work in that scenario ?
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.
[1]: https://ente.io/download/desktop
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If I can interrupt..
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.
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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
I haven’t tried it (yet), but self hosting Ente seems to be easy enough?
Terrible search without AI is a bit of a stretch. Also Google does not have a monopoly on object/face recognition in photos. There are self-hosted solutions that readily provide you with that without feeding a faceless AI with your photos while boiling the ocean.
> Terrible search without AI is a bit of a stretch.
How so? I was looking for a photo of a grave I took some years ago. In Google photos I just searched for "grave" and if found 2 photos, including the one I wanted.
Without AI I would have to search all my photos. Maybe I could narrow it down by date and location but it would take a lot longer.
I've been playing with LLama 3.2 Vision 8B for such a use-case, and found it does a good job at providing image descriptions which could be indexed, along with transcription of any text in the image, such as the name on the grave in this case.
So should be possible to have a similar capability locally now.
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I have 100s of grave photos. Browsing by location would be way simpler
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Could you please tell some? I am about to switch to a self-hosted solution.
Syncthing, python face_recognition [1], a static gallery (sigal [2]), and a few lines of bash and its fully automatic. I can even share links with family.
[1] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition
[2] https://github.com/saimn/sigal
https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
I am very very happy with immich. See the other commenter's response for many more.
Immich is really good. They have AI semantic search, face grouping, etc. Really similar to Google Photos. Only the mobile app is still not that good.
https://immich.app/
It is a weird advertisement when Ente (the name of the service) will also see your photos.
Ente is client side E2EE at rest, on device AI, open source and audited.
E2EE solves all of these issues as long as it's open source and reproducible.
Efforts like these should be praised.
So then how can it be a paid service?
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The service is end to end encrypted with local AI for indexing.
I tried it a few months ago however and the upload/encryption was so slow from their desktop app it would have taken weeks to migrate my photos to the service.
Apple Photos in iCloud can also be E2E encrypted (though not by default: you have to explicitly enable that), are indexed locally, and Apple's pricing for storage is about half of this service.
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I think it's a pretty clever advert to be fair.
And I really like some of the stuff they are doing.
Their TOTP app is great.
How do you opt out of Google updating your user/advertising profile based on information they glean from your photos?
"Google Photos doesn't sell your photos, videos, or personal information to anyone and we don't use your photos and videos for advertising."
https://safety.google/photos/
That phrasing raises my weasel-word hackles… first of all, it’s unclear what it would mean to “use your photos and videos for advertising.” That sounds to me like reprinting your photos to advertise something—which nobody accused them of doing.
Perhaps more importantly, it only mentions the photos and videos themselves in relation to the advertising. Analyzing the photos (as per the demo in TFA) isn’t “advertising,” and neither is building a user profile.
Then later on, when they use that user profile to allow others to advertise to the user—that’s not “using your photos or videos for advertising” either. Nor is it “selling your personal information to anyone,” since what they’re selling is access to you instead of selling specific personal dossiers.
From where I’m sitting, that still seems to leave the door open to Google itself using what it gleans from your photos to build out your profile, use those insights across their whole company, and target ads at you. It also seems to leave the door open to selling “depersonalized” analyses to third parties, not to mention giving free access to whoever it might see fit (research groups, state actors,…), no?
There’s also a big difference between “doesn’t” and “will never.” Once an analysis with value exists, it seems counter to the forces of nature and commerce for it not to find its way out eventually. Just as the consumer DNA-sequencing firms pinky-swore everything was private, then gradually started spreading people’s genomes farther and wider.
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Twitter also said they would not use 2FA phone numbers for advertising purposes... and yet ended up doing it.
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Couldn't they argue that they use a description of what is on the photos and not the photos?
And why should I believe that? There's no reason for them not to lie and go and do whatever they want.
Right. They give away your photos, videos and personal information,and others might use them for advertising.
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Neither of those statements would prevent them from updating your advertising profile with information their AI gleans from your photos.
The question of how you opt out of that remains.
Google has been caught multiple times violating their own rules and the law to use all the information they have on you for advertising purposes. The only opt out is to stop using their services.
Move to the EU.
Somehow, neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Samsung, nor (probably) any other big tech company, can usefully extract data from photos anymore. Face recognition in particular works like one of those Shabbat-compatible appliances: something gets extracted at some point, eventually, but infrequently, and only when you're not looking - and, most importantly, it's not possible for you to control or advise the process. The AI processing runs autonomously in such a way that you may start doubting whether it's happening at all!
I assume that this is the vendors' workaround around GDPR and such in relevant jurisdictions, but this also makes face search/grouping nearly useless. Don't get me wrong - I'm very much with the EU on data protection and privacy, but getting gaslighted by the apps themselves about the extents of and reasons for ML limitations in those apps, that's just annoying.
> This is just an ad for their photo service.
Good. The more companies that treat users like humans instead of chattel the better.