Ente Release Notes

In March, we released Ensu more as an idea than a product. A private, on-device LLM app, shipped early on purpose — so the people who would care about something like this could shape what it becomes.

Then we paused.

We wanted to see whether there was real interest in a privacy-first AI app made in a user-friendly way, and what people would actually ask for once they had it in their hands. Lots of feedback, bug reports, and "have you considered..." messages later, two things stood out:

People find value in a private AI app.

And there is still so much room for improvement!

So we're picking the work back up. This release is the start of that.

Gemma 4 by default

On desktop, Ensu now ships with Gemma 4 out of the box. You get noticeably stronger answers from the very first chat, with nothing to configure and no separate download to wait for.

Talk to Ensu

On Android and iOS, you can now tap the mic and speak your prompt instead of typing. Transcription happens locally on your phone, so your voice never leaves the device.

Image queries, way faster

Asking Ensu about a picture used to take a noticeable beat. A round of work under the hood has brought that down to close to instant, across every platform.

Smoother model downloads

Pulling a new model onto your device — desktop or mobile — is dramatically quicker and far more reliable than before. Less waiting, fewer restarts.

This is the first of more iterations to come. We're excited to see where they take us, and the direction will be shaped as much by you as by us. If there's something you wish Ensu did differently, a feature you'd love to see, or a use case we haven't thought of yet, come tell us in the #ensu channel on our Discord.

You can download Ensu here.

Ente Locker is for the practical parts of a life: IDs, insurance papers, medical records, passwords, notes, and the documents someone may need in your absence.

Since launch, we learned that someone, without an Ente account, also needs a way to recover your Ente account if you lose access, are incapacitated, or are no longer around.

That is what Legacy Kit is for.

How it works

Legacy Kit is a set of 3 recovery sheets. Each sheet has a secret QR code and instructions to recover your account. You give each sheet a name ("Son", "Lawyer", "that drawer with all the cables", ...), print or save, and share them separately.

Any 2 of the 3 sheets are enough to recover your account. One sheet on its own is not enough.

The person recovering does not need an Ente account or app. They can open legacy.ente.com and scan 2 of the 3 sheets to access your full Ente account – Photos, Locker and Auth.

Waiting period

Each kit has a configurable waiting period: immediate, 1 day, 7 days, 15 days, or 30 days.

Immediate is useful for self-recovery, in case you have locked yourself out of your account. Longer waits are better when the kit is for someone else, because they give you time to notice and block an attempt if something looks wrong.

You can create up to 5 kits per account. This lets you plan for different situations. A short-window helps with self-recovery, and a longer one with inheritance.

Revoking access

When there is an attempt to recover your account, Ente emails you.

You can block an active recovery session within the waiting period you configured.

You can also delete a kit to disable those sheets and prevent any future recovery attempt.

More details

Legacy Kit started as a hackathon project called 2of3. The prototype split a secret into 3 parts. It evolved into Legacy Kit after we made it revocable and server-mediated.

When you create a Legacy Kit, Ente generates a random secret and splits it into 3 shares using the 2-of-3 threshold scheme. Any 2 shares can rebuild the secret. Here is the maths.

This secret never touches our servers. From it, Ente derives an encryption key that protects your recovery material, and a challenge keypair that lets the server verify someone has enough sheets without seeing the secret.

During recovery, a helper combines two sheets in their browser to open a sealed challenge from the server. After the waiting period passes, the server returns the encrypted recovery material, which is decrypted locally to complete a standard password reset.

The server never sees the kit secret, the shares, or your decrypted recovery key.

Legacy Kit is now available on Ente Locker on both Android and iOS.

Pick photos from Ente in other apps

We've been steadily working on making Ente Photos a great gallery app on Android, one that fits naturally into the everyday moments where you reach for your photos: tapping a camera thumbnail to review a shot, attaching a photo in a messenger, browsing your library without thinking about which app you're in. The latest release is another solid step in that direction.

When another app asks you to attach a photo or video, Ente Photos now shows up as one of the apps you can pick from. Open it, browse your library, select what you need, and the original app gets the files back. It works with the system photo picker and with any app that uses the standard Android intents for media.

Open camera shots directly in Ente

After taking a photo, many camera apps show a small thumbnail you can tap to review the shot. On supported camera apps, that thumbnail now opens the photo directly in Ente's viewer — zoom, share, or delete it without leaving Ente.

For details and known limitations (looking at you, Pixel Camera), see the docs.

After Gallery mode let you use Ente Photos without an account, these integrations are the next step in a longer effort toward Ente Photos working as a true Android default gallery — something we're tracking in this discussion. More pieces are already on the way. If there's a gallery flow you rely on that still feels rough on Android, come tell us in Discord.

When we launched Locker, we wanted it to be a private place for important information.

The kind you may not open every day, but need quickly when the moment comes.

Medical records. Identity cards. Insurance papers. Travel documents. Notes and passwords your family may depend on.

We have been improving Locker around that simple idea.

Your files should be available when you need them. They should be easy to share with the right person. And they should be easier to manage when you are at a computer.

Here's what's new.

Save files for offline use

Some documents cannot wait for a good internet connection.

You can now save files in Locker for offline use on mobile. So when you are travelling, at a hospital, or somewhere with poor network, your selected files can still be opened.

Saved files stay encrypted inside Locker on your phone, so you can keep important documents close without leaving them exposed.

Share collections with links

Once your documents are organized in Locker, there are times when someone else needs access too.

You can now share a whole Locker collection with a link. This is useful for travel papers, medical files, property documents, or any group of files that belong together.

The person opening the link does not need an Ente account. They can open it in their browser and view what you shared.

You can also add a password, set an expiry, and limit how many devices can open the link.

Try Locker on web

Locker is also now available on web in beta, at

locker.ente.com.

This gives you more room to review, organize, and download documents from a computer. It is helpful when you are sorting through many files or sharing a collection with someone else.

Shared collection links also open on web, including password-protected links.

Mobile keeps Locker with you. Web makes it easier to sit down and manage what matters.

Still private by design

Locker remains end-to-end encrypted.

Your files are encrypted before they leave your device. We cannot read your documents, notes, or passwords.

Offline files, collection links, and web beta all build on the same promise: a private place for the information that matters, available when you need it.

If you have not tried Locker yet, now is a good time to start.

Memory Lane

A photo takes a second to capture, but what it holds can last a lifetime. Your phone is full of them - birthdays, trips, ordinary Tuesdays that somehow got preserved.

But the tools we use to share photos rarely reflect what those memories are worth. A photo on WhatsApp becomes just another message in a busy chat. A post on Instagram becomes part of a feed, quickly scrolled past.

Neither feels right for a photo of your grandmother from twenty years ago, or your best friend on the last night of a trip you still talk about.

Those photos deserve better.

We built Memory Lane to help show someone how you’ve captured them over the years.

Open a person’s page in Ente, and you’ll see a quiet journey through time, told through the photos you’ve taken of them. A face changing slowly. A child growing up. A friendship measured in a handful of special moments.

It’s one of the most personal things you can share.

Share memories as links

Memories in Ente, whether from an anniversary, a party, or a trip you’d half forgotten, can be shared as a link.

The person on the other end sees exactly what you see: the same photos, the same framing, the same feeling of being taken back.

They don’t need an account. They don’t need the app. They just open the link, and it’s there.

Faster links

For shared memories to feel right, receiving them has to feel effortless. We’ve put a lot of care into making the experience feel as close to the in-app version as possible.

As part of that work, we also refactored our web app to make album links load significantly faster, up to 80% faster.

Sharing is one of the most important parts of a great photos experience. Memory Lane and shared memory links are a step in that direction, but there’s more to come.

We’d love to hear what you think. Find us on Discord.

We recently shipped a new pure Rust cryptography layer that now powers the Locker web app and Ensu. It is the start of a gradual move away from libsodium toward a single shared implementation that compiles natively to mobile and trivially to the web via WASM.

We love libsodium. But in Rust, the popular wrappers still bottleneck on libsodium-sys, a C dependency that makes cross-compilation painful. Pure Rust crates from the RustCrypto project gave us the same primitives with byte-for-byte wire compatibility, and one cargo build for every target. One crate, thin binding layers for each platform: web, mobile, CLI.

The new layer (our ente-core crate) is not large, but since it handles all the encryption we felt we needed independent eyes on it before rolling it out.

The review

Short version: we passed. winfunc found only medium and low severity issues, none of which materially affect us within our threat model. We’ll still address them, but for all practical purposes, green tick.

That's usually where the blog post would end. Link the report. Move on.

But we think the auditor deserves more than a footnote.

winfunc

winfunc is an LLM-powered security audit startup.

Their name is a nod to the CTF idea of a 'win function': a function that already exists in a program for a different purpose, but that an attacker repurposes by reaching it in a context where it should never run.

We'd been through the other, more established automated security review tools before, and had found them to be mostly noise.

We first came across winfunc when they audited our server code on their own initiative. That report was noticeably better: It was clearer (the findings read like they were written for an engineer), had fewer false positives, and felt directly actionable ("here's what's wrong, here's where, here's what to do.")

We met the founders. They're sharp, young, and building something that already punches well above its weight.

And when it came time to review ente-core, we reached out to them.

What's next

ente-core is live in the new Locker web beta, and is also integrated into Ensu.

Over time, unless a pure Rust libsodium port appears, it'll make its way into our other apps too. The engineering holy grail: one pure Rust crypto implementation everywhere.

We've been heads-down building for a while, and we have a lot to share with you.

From an offline gallery experience to a better feed, faster ML, and improvements in sharing - here's everything that landed and what it means for you.

Offline Gallery

You can now use Ente Photos without creating an account. No sign-up, no friction. Once you're in, you can explore smart search, face recognition, and curated memories alongside your photos and albums.

This is our first step toward a genuinely great offline gallery experience, and we have a lot more planned to improve it over time.

Masonry Layout for Links

Public links will now show your photos and videos in a beautiful masonry layout by default. It makes a big difference to the experience when someone opens a link. You can customise the layout for each shared album, choosing between masonry, trip, and grouped depending on what you're sharing.

Quick Links on Desktop and Web

Quick links for single photos and videos can now be created from the desktop and web apps. Links to single photos and videos will now open the item directly in a full screen view.

Social Feed for Your Family

Incoming shared albums and photos will now appear in your feed. Notifications for any sharing activity also take you straight there. It makes keeping up with your family and other Ente contacts a lot more natural - view, like and comment from the same space.

If you've been thinking about getting your family onto Ente, this is a great time to do it.

Machine Learning Improvements

We've integrated a vector database into our ML infrastructure, making search noticeably faster and people suggestions more accurate.

We're also migrating to a shared, high-performance Rust core across all our apps, something that will keep paying dividends in speed and reliability across all our platforms. More on this soon.

Custom Recovery Periods for Legacy

You can now set the waiting period for account recovery independently for each of your trusted contacts: 7, 14, or 30 days.

A small change, but an important one for anyone who's taken the time to set up Legacy properly.

Hidden Photo Management

Hidden photos on mobile got a meaningful upgrade. You can now delete hidden files directly from your device so they don't linger in your camera roll.

You can also clean up hidden files from non-hidden albums to avoid any accidents. And shared albums can now be hidden too.

A few more improvements

• Ignore named people on mobile
• More collage layouts
• Search for on-device albums
• Catalan support across all platforms
• Fixed window controls hiding app UI on iPadOS
• Fixed iOS video player crash
• Fixed broken map view
• Fixed pinch-to-zoom accidentally opening the info sheet on videos
• Fixed file picker galleries getting clipped on wider screens

That's a lot — but it is a good reflection of where we're headed. Over the course of the next few months, we want to build a much better family and sharing experience, have a great offline gallery mode, while also improving the look, feel and performance across platforms.

We are incredibly excited about what's coming next. If you have any feedback or thoughts, please join our Discord, and let us know.

LLMs are too important to be left to big tech. There is a gap between frontier models and models that can run on your device, but local models improve each day, and once they cross a certain capability threshold, they will be good enough for most purposes; and will come with full privacy and control.

Based on these assumptions, we've been working on Ensu, Ente's offline LLM app. Today is our first release.

Download it here.

In the rest of this post, we'll explain why we think the assumptions hold, what we're doing, and how you can get involved.

Why

LLMs are too important to be left to big tech. We've written in depth about this earlier, here and here.

Briefly, those posts come at it from two angles:

If you're someone who hates LLMs, you would still be able to recognize in clearer moments of thought that LLMs are a technology that can't just be wished away.

If you're someone who finds joy in interacting with LLMs, you would recognize the lack of privacy and the high dependency (arbitrary bans, content shaping, non-portable memory) you have on centralized providers.

And in both cases it is also clear that LLMs can be used to manipulate people en masse. Ergo, we can't be at the mercy of big tech controlling them.

The issue is that there is a capability gap between large centralized models and smaller models that can be run offline on your device.

But we're problem solvers, and this is not our first rodeo. When we first started Ente Photos, it seemed unthinkable that we'd be able to deliver face recognition, person clustering and natural language image search all running locally on your device. People called us crazy.

It took many years, but we did it. Our users enjoy these features every day. Everything is done locally on device, and also synced, end-to-end encrypted, across all your devices. Full privacy, full control, without loss of convenience; technology in service of people, not as a tool of surveillance.

In the same vein, while we have been itching for a long time to do something about local LLMs, it is only recently that smaller models are becoming feasible to run on consumer devices. We now think there are actionable steps we can take.

This is where the second assumption comes in. While smaller decentralized models improve every day, so do the larger centralized models. However, we think the gap is not what is important - instead, it is about a threshold, and about how the model's capabilities are used. Once smaller models will cross a certain threshold, they will be sufficient to provide joy, utility and convenience in the life of people.

What

Today we're releasing Ensu. It is a chatgpt-like app that runs completely on your device with full privacy and zero cost. Soon, you'll also be able to backup and sync your chats across your devices by connecting your Ente account (or self hosting), with full end-to-end encryption.

This is not the beginning, nor is it the end. This is just a checkpoint.

Ensu is currently an Ente Labs project. For now, we want to only iterate on the product and its direction, without bringing pricing and stability too early into the picture.

Just to set expectations right, it is currently not as powerful as ChatGPT or Claude Code. Still, it is already quite fun! Here are some things we've been doing with it:

• Introspecting about thoughts we wouldn’t risk putting into a non-private LLM.
• Talking about books (Ensu currently doesn't have web search, but you'll be surprised how well it knows classics like the Gita or the Bible)
• Jabbering with it on flights when there is no internet.

The app is open source, and available for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux and Windows. We also have an experimental web based version. Image attachments are also supported. The core logic is written in Rust, and for each platform we have native (mobile) and Tauri (desktop) apps that use the same shared logic.

We've already implemented (optional) E2EE syncing and backups so that you can access your chats across devices. This uses the Ente account you already have, and it can also be self hosted just like Ente Photos. However, at the last minute we decided not to enable sync in the checkpoint we're releasing today. That's the story of the next section.

What next

We're viewing Ensu as a journey. There is a precise destination - a private, personal LLM with encrypted sync - however the path to it is hazy. There are multiple directions we could take:

• Instead of general chat, we shape Ensu to have a more specialized interface, say like a single, never-ending note you keep writing on, while the LLM offers suggestions, critiques, reminders, context, alternatives, viewpoints, quotes. A second brain, if you will.
• A more utilitarian take, say like an Android Launcher, where the LLM is an implementation detail behind an existing interaction that people are already used to.
• Your agent, running on your phone. No setup, no management, no manual backups. An LLM that grows with you, remembers you, your choices, manages your tasks, and has long-term memory and personality.

For now we will just wait a while for feedback before taking the next step. And because these future directions might change the persistence architecture, we've delayed enabling sync.

When sync does arrive, your existing local chats will get backed up and sync too.

We would love your feedback. The next steps are unclear, and we want you to influence what we build. Tell us what you want, and we'll make it. You can write to us at [email protected], or join our Discord and head over to the #ensu channel.

You can download Ensu here.

Ente Paste is a simple way to share sensitive text, fast: API keys, snippets, notes, or instructions.

It’s built for privacy first:

• End-to-end encrypted links
• Anonymous use (no account required)
• One-time access (opening consumes the paste)
• Automatic expiry after 24 hours
• 4,000-character limit for quick, practical sharing
• Preview crawler protections to avoid accidental consumption

The encryption key stays in the URL fragment (#...), so Ente servers only store ciphertext. After a successful open, the paste is deleted.

If you need lightweight, disposable, encrypted text sharing, try it now: paste.ente.com.

Need a longer-lasting way to share notes? Use Ente Locker for secure, durable sharing.

Ever since I started working on Ente, my father has been asking me to focus on documents, not just photos. It was only when I became a parent that I understood why.

There is a lot of information we have to organize - medical records, insurance policies, identity cards, passwords, and notes - for emergencies.

Today I'm happy to share Locker - an app that is simple enough for our parents, flexible enough for our partners, and gentle enough to support loved ones in our absence.

You can use Locker to

save important documents, notes, passwords, and more

organize them into collections

share them with links

set up trusted contacts to access them in your absence

Locker is free - for up to 100 items, all features included. If you're subscribed to Ente Photos, you can store up to 1000 items. More details are available here.

Also, Locker is end-to-end encrypted and fully open source.

We built Locker for the things that matter most. I hope it serves you well.

We kicked off 2026 with two releases that moved Ente Photos significantly forward across sharing, organization, and everyday usability. Across mobile, desktop, and web, we shipped new features and improvements that make sharing more social, photo management easier, and the overall experience more joyful.

More reasons to share

Likes and comments

Your photos are phenomenal conversation starters. While sharing has always been core to Ente Photos, conversations around shared photos often happened outside that private space. Not anymore.

You and your loved ones can now like and comment on shared photos across all platforms. Even friends who are not on Ente can react and comment on photos and albums shared via a link.

Incoming likes and comments now appear in the Shared tab and via push notifications in the mobile app, so keeping up with activity is simple and immediate.

Admin role for albums

Party and event albums often involve friends and family uploading large numbers of photos. Managing those albums can quickly become cumbersome, especially when someone needs to review and moderate content.

The new admin role makes that easier. Album owners can assign another Ente user as an admin to help remove photos, add viewers and collaborators, moderate comments, and suggest permanent deletion to photo owners for controversial shots.

This role is also useful for everyday family sharing. For example, partners can co-manage a family album more conveniently. The goal is to give album owners and trusted collaborators better tools to keep shared spaces clean and relevant. The admin role is available across platforms, so everyone can use the device they’re most comfortable with.

Download albums as ZIPs

Based directly on user feedback, you can now download an entire album as multipart ZIP files on web and desktop.

This is especially useful for link-shared albums, where friends may want a local copy. In the past, that often meant downloading photos one by one, triggering many separate downloads. Now they can download the full album in a few ZIP files.

Quality-of-life improvements

Settings redesign

The Settings experience on mobile has been completely redesigned. Settings are where people go for control, clarity, and confidence, so this update focuses on making everything cleaner and easier to navigate.

The new layout is easier to scan, and built-in search helps you jump straight to the toggle you need instead of scrolling through sections.

This is part of a broader design-language refresh across Ente, with more updates coming in upcoming releases.

Mobile search experience

Search on mobile is now faster and easier to use, with quicker tab loading, a redesigned results screen, and the search bar moved to the top.

Search is also now available directly within Discover, Location, and File Type pages in the Search tab.

Person management on mobile

Managing faces across years of photos can be tedious. Several updates now make that workflow smoother: sorting and search in the faces list, a dedicated page for ignored faces, and easier face merging.

Organization experience on desktop

Many desktop workflows in Ente Photos are centered around organization, and several improvements now make that process faster.

You can now hide shared albums and upload directly to hidden albums. A Select all action is available in both album and gallery views.

Album lists can also be sorted while uploading, adding, or moving photos, making it easier to find the right destination quickly. The main album list now supports more sorting options as well: name, creation time, and modified time, each in ascending or descending order.

And so much more

On mobile, you can finally pinch to zoom in videos. Unsupported image formats now show preview images instead of a blank screen. The collage creation flow is also improved, with easier photo swapping and replacement.

On web and desktop, there’s a new context menu for photos, so common actions are just a right-click away. You can also clean up uncategorized photos by removing items that already exist in other albums. Editing GPS location is now possible directly on web and desktop too—an often-requested feature that was previously available only on mobile.

There are many more small improvements and bug fixes beyond what’s listed here. See the full list.

January set the tone for how we want to build in 2026: ship faster, listen closely, and improve the parts of Ente Photos you use most.

Many of these updates came directly from user requests, and we’re continuing in that direction.

Introducing Rituals

With Ente Photos’ last release of 2025, we are introducing a new feature that will help build better habits for the upcoming year. And there are a bunch of improvements to make your experience better.

Here’s what’s new.

For many of us, photos aren’t just memories. We use them to stay consistent: workouts, meals, skincare, recovery and more.

Rituals lets you start a habit and track your progress through photos. Take a photo every day or start a new workout ritual. You can find rituals in the search tab.

Read about why we built this, and tell us what you think.

Public links for everyone

What good are photos if you can’t share your moments of joy with others?

We have now made public links available for all our customers, whether they are on a free or a paid plan.

Earlier, we had restricted links to only the paid plan in order to prevent abuse. With this update, we’re now opening it up for everyone.

For our customers on the free plan, there would still be some restrictions - a max device limit of 5. While this new restriction still helps us prevent abuse, every one can now share their photos and albums with loved ones.

Tag people manually

Some of your favorite moments are with people who never end up in the photo.

Now you can tag people manually even if they’re not in the picture. One of our most requested features, and a surprisingly powerful way to keep your library accurate and searchable.

Quality-of-life upgrades

And finally, a bunch of improvements that make everyday use easier. You can now pin shared albums, so your important albums are just a tap away.

Album links would now be visible to all participants, making it easier for anyone in the album to share it with others.

There is also a redesigned photo view and a new favorite icon - making space for the next wave of features.

2026

We’re excited about what 2026 looks like for Ente.

Photos continues to remain our primary focus, and we have a lot of features lined up for the year ahead. We’re also planning to spend much of Q1 refining the experience — tightening the flows, smoothing rough edges, and ironing out the small inconveniences that add up.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think - especially about Rituals and where you want Photos to go next. Share your thoughts with the team on Discord.

I used to bite my nails. It has been the hardest bad habit to shake by far. I had been doing it for years, and it would be so bad that my mother would try to scare me when I was a child. She told me that I would lose my fingers if I kept going. I knew that she was probably right, but I still could not stop.

I tried all the tricks, like that disgusting transparent nail polish designed to discourcage nail-biting by making your nails taste like chemicals. It would work for a while, but it never worked for good. At best, I once stopped for a month. Still, one stressful moment was enough to be right back where I started. So I gave up. I accepted I would lose a finger someday, and maybe that would finally be the moment I stop.

Then I met my partner. She also pointed out that I should really stop. Her support, and her stubborn belief that I could do it, gave me the energy to try again. I told her I had never managed to stop for more than a few weeks. So she came up with a great idea: I should take a photo of my nails every day. I forced myself to take that photo every day. And it worked!

It has been a year now. I still take a photo every day. My nails have never been better.

I am still hesitant to say I have completely ditched the habit. I do not want to jinx it, but for the first time in my life, I am very sure I will not go back to biting my nails. Bundling the intention with a daily photo gave me the push I needed. It became a ritual, and the streak kept going and kept me honest.

This is a very personal example, but there are many reasons to take photos regularly. Maybe you want to track your gym progress, or strive to eat cleaner. You could start a study streak, even if to learn a little but learn a little every day. Maybe you want to take a photo of your child every day, and watch them grow up. Maybe you want to become a better photographer, and a daily photo forces you to get creative. Or maybe you just like to take photos.

I realized how much power a consistent ritual can have. I realized how well photos fit into that. So we built Rituals in Ente Photos.

You can create a ritual linked to an album. Pick the right days and time for it. When it is time, you get a notification. The app takes you straight to an in-app camera. Take your photo and watch it get uploaded automatically to your linked album.

And because this is Ente, those albums are end-to-end encrypted. That means the privacy and security you need, even for intimate rituals.

It also gives you a clear overview of your consistency. A streak counter. A month overview. And a quick view of the last few days.

It is simple. It is satisfying. And it makes it easier to keep going.

The new year is approaching fast. We hope Rituals will be a small help to make 2026 more mindful than the last year. We are curious to see what rituals you will create. Come tell us what you are planning in our community! See you next year. Happy new year!

Everyone loves those end of year music recaps, where your past year unfolds as a collection of songs you almost forgot about. They are fun and playful, but usually come at the cost of handing over a lot of data.

Your listening history is just a tiny slice of your life. Your photos tell a much richer story. They carry the people you spent time with, the places you visited, the little moments. What would a yearly recap built from your photos look like, if it was joyful and still fully private? Last month we set out to answer that and created something we hoped would make people smile when they opened Ente Photos. That is how Ente Rewind 2025 was born.

We decided to structure Ente Rewind as a sequence of cards, each one capturing a different facet of your 2025.

We start with a simple throwback. The first photos you took in 2025 set the tone, and it is surprisingly emotional to see again. From there, we move into some gentle stats about your year in pictures. How many memories you captured, and in what form. Which month was photo taking season for you?

Then we shift the focus to people, because they make the year feel special. We designed cards around the faces that show up in your photos. You see the people who appeared most often, the new faces that entered your life, and the core crew you spent your time with. You get a sense of whether 2025 was about family, friends, colleagues, or some mix of everything.

Places get their own spotlight too. We surface photos from your most common spots and show how your memories spread across them. Maybe you lived at your favorite cafe, maybe you bounced between cities, maybe your backyard quietly stole the show.

Then comes the visual story. We show photos that feel interesting even if you do not remember taking them. Happy faces where everyone is having a good time. Those almost perfect shots where something went amusingly wrong at the last second. The main color palette of your year, and the brightest shots that cut through the timeline.

Finally, we wanted Rewind to land in a place that feels both curated and personal. Toward the end, we show an automatic selection of joy sparking photos. Right after that, we transition into your own favorites collection for 2025. Here is what we found interesting based on the pixels, and here is what you showed you care about.

From a product perspective, this is a recap. From a technical perspective, it is a recap that has to be generated without us ever seeing your photos.

Ente Photos is encrypted. We don't have unencrypted copies of your photos in our cloud, and we don't collect any app usage metrics. We don't know which photos you have, which ones you view the most, or which album you open every day.

What we do have is machine learning that runs locally on your device. For Ente Rewind, we leaned heavily on that groundwork.

We used our existing face recognition to find photos of the people you care about, without any of those faces ever being visible to us. We also experimented with the image embeddings we already compute. By comparing these embeddings against each other and against carefully crafted queries, we can estimate which photos are likely to be visually interesting or joyful. Doing this well meaned combining multiple queries, merging and filtering the results, and making careful selections that feel good.

We cannot look at a random user library and tweak a threshold. That forced us to be creative, to simulate a lot, and to lean on our own libraries when testing. You will know more about how well it works on your photos than we ever can.

A first time experience is shaped as much by sound as by visuals. We did not want Rewind to feel like a static slideshow. We wanted it to feel like a short story about your year.

We decided to create something original that fits the mood of Ente Rewind. This is where we are lucky to have people like Ashil on the team, who not only paints pretty pixels on your screen, but also makes great music. He composed and tuned a custom piece that sits in the background of Rewind. It is has that sentimental feel that matches your vibe, while being subtle enough to not distract from your photos.

If you have been with Ente for a while, you have probably met Ducky. When we started sketching Rewind, it felt obvious that Ducky should show up somewhere.

We placed Ducky at the very end of every Rewind, as a closing badge. The badge fits what you photographed in 2025. Are you a People Person who spent most of the year capturing friends and family? A Portrait Pro with a gallery full of carefully composed faces? A Consistency Champ, Globetrotter, or Minimalist? We designed custom Ducky badges that match the kind of year you had.

The idea is not to score or judge you. It is to give you a small, friendly conclusion to your recap, a character you can recognize and maybe smile at.

Building Ente Rewind 2025 has been an especially joyful project to work on. It combines many things we care about: strong privacy, thoughtful use of private ML, and small product touches that make people feel good. Watching my own Rewind reminded me of how full a year can be.

This is our first Rewind, and we hope to make it a tradition. If you watched yours we would love to hear what you liked, what felt off, and what you wish it did differently, so that we can make next year even better. Come say hi in our community and tell us how your 2025 looked!

Bringing OCR to mobile

Ente Photos now comes with text recognition on both iOS and Android. Open any photo with text, tap the new text icon, and the app will surface the words it sees. Everything happens on your device, so nothing about that receipt, passport or love letter ever leaves your control.

For more information on how to use it, please check our docs.

For iOS, we could lean on Apple's excellent Vision framework. It ships with the OS and all of the work stays local, hence private. Most importantly, it actually works well. Using such a mature system API meant the iOS implementation was very straightforward.

Android is where we needed to build something new. Until now, most open-source implementations were aging Tesseract ports with lackluster accuracy. Google's ML Kit was the only available implementation with good results, but its dependence on Google Play Services and closed nature made it a non-starter for us.

We eventually found PaddleOCR. It was built for large-scale document ingestion, not consumer phones, but the models looked exactly like what we needed.

PaddleOCR provided the architecture we wanted to mirror, and RapidOCR confirmed conversion to ONNX was possible, so we rolled up our sleeves and brought PaddleOCR v5 over to ONNX Runtime on Android.

This meant exporting the DB detector, angle classifier, and SVTR recognizer to ONNX. We then rebuilt all the pre- and post-processing in Kotlin, covering polygon extraction, angle fixes, CTC decoding, and the rest, so we preserve the exact behavior of the original PaddleOCR pipeline. We wrapped everything inside a Flutter plugin powered by ONNX Runtime Mobile, and added a lightweight text check so the app can scan a gallery during scrolls and only run full recognition when a photo actually needs it.

The payoff is high-accuracy OCR that comfortably runs on all phones, locally and privately. It handles rotated documents, street signs, and multi-language receipts with the same fidelity as PaddleOCR, only now it happens entirely on your device. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully open-source OCR solution available on Android that actually works well.

Try it

Update to the latest Ente Photos release, open a photo, and tap the text icon to select and copy the words. We'd love to hear the workflows this unlocks for you - drop by Discord and tell us what you're reading next.