[pseufaux]

I have been impressed with Ente products and customer service. It's good to see they are growing. That said, revenue information is not entirely helpful in a vacuum. I'd be more keen on seeing profit (even at a lower timeline resolution). What's the average cost for taking on a new customer? What's the retention/turnover? Etc. That said the products are great and I'd recommend them to anyone.

[stavros]

I wish I could say the same. I tried Ente the other day, to see how it compares to Immich, but it was very hit-and-miss. Face recognition for people never worked, no matter what I tried, for example.

[alexktz]

I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots.

The client / server relationship with Ente is peculiar, and on my test dataset of about 1000 images did not perform at all. Face recognition, semantic search, etc, it was not in the same league as Immich tbh. (Also hi Stavros!)

[stavros]

Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.

[0x6c6f6c]

Comparing self-hosted immich and a truly E2EE hosted platform like Ente is really odd. There are massively different trade-offs and target customers between these.

Ente is a private hosted photo storage and sharing platform. Only trusted devices that can decrypt /encrypt would even be able to perform the kind of work to tag photos for face recognition, and in this category I'm not aware of any hosted alyermative that actually does this, and they do a _pretty good job_ considering the limitations of E2EE.

Immich, Google Photos, Apple Photos- these platforms don't have to work around the fact all user data is opaque ciphertext. I imagine you could extend the capabilities of machine learning to a trusted node (similar to what you can do with Ente Desktop, but with more capable models), but they still have to work around any of that metadata being visible to them as well.

This takes somewhat trivial problems and makes them entirely non-trivial to solve. Self hosted platforms that don't provide an E2EE story have significantly less headache to deal with, especially since most people justify it by "it's running on my server so it's okay". And I get that, you can generally work around this issue with disk-level encryption and you're all good. It's just not the same product at all.

[stavros]

I agree it's not. It's just that, for someone who doesn't need the trustless architecture, it doesn't make sense to go with Ente right now, because it doesn't work as well. I could overlook the missing features if the ones that are there worked, but face recognition just got stuck for me and never finished.

[cdman]

Here is my use-case for a trustless architecture: there are parts of my families digital life which I would prefer to continue working as much as possible, even if I'm temporarily or permanently unavailable. "Pay this amount of money monthly/yearly for this to keep working" is a straight forward concept for 99.999% of the population. "Poke around in docker debugging logs if this stuff stuff" is not.

And, if stuff has to be hosted by third parties for me, I prefer it to be encrypted.

[Grombobulous]

Have you tried contacting support?

I’ve never had any issue with facial recognition. Maybe this is a rare issue that’s an easy fix.

[ignoramous]

> I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller...

You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a off-device/server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?

[Cider9986]

I'm not a bot :)

[alexktz]

That's exactly what a bot would say. ~_~

[Cider9986]

Fuck you

[brnt]

Typical bot!

[cdman]

Who knows what the problem could be - if you want to invest time into this, you could try collecting some debug logs to see if it indicates anything. For me and my family it works pretty well (~300G of data across 10s of thousands of photos / videos). Face recognition / AI search works reasonably well. It's not perfect, but I'm happy to keep our photos under our control rather with some big tech company which could decide on a whim to erase all of my data (or even worse, report me to the police and then erase all of my data).

Of course I also dump all of the data about once per week on a NAS, just in case :)

[stavros]

Hm really? I had about 30 photos in it and face recognition just got completely stuck.