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vishnukvmdon Show HN: A Handwritten Blogging Platform

This is beautiful!

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Implementation details here: https://ente.com/blog/building-shareable-links/

70% is our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...).

We have to reduce our prices, to make Ente's products accessible to a wider audience. But right now the focus is on building a sustainable business and increasing the probability of this business outliving us.

vishnukvmdon Ente – Opening Our Books

Hi, answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905

vishnukvmdon Ente – Opening Our Books

ente.com/open is fully automated.

Publishing operating costs will create operational overhead, since we've to manually consolidate, label and publish expense records. Not excited about doing that right now, but would like to in the future.

Currently we've runway for a few years, and a margin of ~70% – entirety of which is reinvested into building Ente.

vishnukvmdon Ente – Opening Our Books

Thanks, I'm a fan of Smugmug :)

vishnukvmdon Ente's business metrics are open now

Hi, author of the blog post here.

> sources of funding.

Ente has raised ~$300k in its lifetime from friends and founders / angels over SAFE notes. We've also received non-dilutive grants from Mozilla[0], CERN[1] and GitHub[2] and FLOSS/fund[3]. The business is now self-sustaining.

[0]: https://ente.com/blog/mozilla-builders/

[1]: https://github.com/open-source/github-secure-open-source-fun...

[2]: https://ente.com/blog/cern-audit/

[3]: https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

Smart albums are collections that support rule based additions, as well as one-off additions. So a contributor can add photos directly to the collection, without the owner's clients not having to perform any extra computation. Also, for one-off additions, tags are irrelevant (the metadata of added items will stay unmodified).

Smart albums will show up next to regular albums, unless you hide / archive them. So you will unfortunately end up with multiple albums next to each other. For the workflow you've mentioned, we have plans to make albums where collaborators can only view the items they have added - so you could share "2026 Summer vacation" to collect photos from Bob and Alice, and you will be able to see photos added by everyone, while Bob and Alice will only be able to see theirs.

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

Happy to share my thoughts!

Current plan is to keep tags as part of an item's metadata, and allow sharing and access control with "smart albums" - that create a collection view over a tag-filter.

For eg. you can create a "smart album" for items that match the tags ["2020", "Holidays"]. Your devices will auto-add any items in your library that match these tags, to this collection. You can then share[0] this album with recipients who can view / add / auto-add items from their library.

Hope this makes sense!

[0]: https://ente.com/architecture/#sharing

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

The way I've thought about this, we will not have "files inside tags", but we will have tags (foo, bar, baz) attached to a file as additional encrypted metadata.

We have existing client-side infrastructure[0] that can create auto-updating albums based on metadata, and this can be extended to enable sharing workflows.

[0]: https://ente.com/help/photos/features/albums-and-organizatio...

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

You will be able to create "smart albums" with nested tags, and share (and contribute) to them.

Albums are tag-like in the sense you described it, but might be an overkill[0] for the outcome we wish to achieve - organization, sharing, and ability to respect original folder structure when a user exports their data.

[0]: https://ente.io/architecture

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

Hey, thanks for the response.

For a bootstrapped, engineering-driven company like Ente, product offers the best leverage for growth. We are not P0-ing nested folders right now because we believe there are areas within the photos app investing into which will provide higher revenue returns, that we can re-invest into increasing our engineering bandwidth.

Now I understand the disappointment around us not prioritizing a feature that is blocking you from even using the product. It is a loss for all parties, but it is important for us to plan long-term. And while we're not prioritizing this specific feature, I don't think it is fair to say that we do not invest time into polish. We do care about our craft[0][1][2].

In case it helps, here's our product lead addressing the timelines for nested albums, and our perspectives around organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lkTspvi_mM&t=367s

[0]: https://ente.com/blog/offline-gallery-faster-ml-family-feed-...

[1]: https://ente.com/blog/likes-comments-admin-settings-ente-pho...

[2]: https://ente.com/blog/introducing-rituals-public-links-ente-...

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

Hi, we had addressed this concern (along with the timelines for nested albums) during our recent AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lkTspvi_mM&t=1728s

If you have any follow up questions, please do ask.

vishnukvmdon Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app

Hi, could you please share logs from Settings > Support > Report bug?

We'd like to fix the crashes.

Sorry for the troubles.

vishnukvmdon Rcarmo/PhotosExport: Export All Your Data from Apple Photos

Is there a similar tool for Google Photos?

vishnukvmdon Porkbun sells out – Starts requiring Age ID despite no legal requirement

"Porkbun requires ID verification" is a better title.

vishnukvmdon Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.

RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.

While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/glacier-cold-storage/

[3]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/ddos-protection/

vishnukvmdon Self-hosting my photos with Immich

Hey, you can connect any S3 compliant service to Ente.

Our quickstart.sh[1] bundles Minio, but you can configure Ente to use RustFS[2] or Garage[3] instead.

[1]: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/#quickstart

[2]: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs

[3]: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

vishnukvmdon MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

It seems like they've pivoted from being a FOSS alternative to AWS S3 to whatever AIStore[1] is.

[1]: https://www.min.io/product/aistor

vishnukvmdon Show HN: Cookies vs. You [30s]

More details: https://consent.gg/about

vishnukvmdon Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down

Hey, happy user of Yaak here, thanks for building this. Wish you success and peace.

vishnukvmdon Kagi Specials

https://ente.io/ml

vishnukvmdon Pixel 10 Phones

You can share and search[1] for your photos from any device on Ente as well, with E2EE.

[1]: https://ente.io/ml