TL;DR: 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.
This is fantastic news! I just got wind of it via email notification. If I could make one recommendation to the team at Ente (@vishnukvmd) , it would be to have some kind of communication in the albums and maybe in the link previews that Ente is E2EE. Kinda like Proton does with Proton Mail in your email signature. It’s a great way to promote Ente. Ability to switch between light and dark mode would be nice too.
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.
I’m not sure if I understand the device limit.
Does this mean you can share links with up to 5 people at any given time?
In other words, free users can only share a single link with p to 5 people or multiple links with up to maximum 5 people (devices). Can someone please confirm.
Also, how do album share links get abused? Are people sharing too many album links, and that’s an issue?
I think there is always a risk of being used to host questionable or illegal content. So you need to have the (legal) capacity to respond to that.
Paid users are less anonymous and therefore i guess less of a liability here.
They’ve been doing good work this past year many updates. I wish they’d spend a bit more time making self hosting quicker to deploy on say truenas and unraid and then maybe have some sort of backup sync option where selected self hosted stuff can be sent to my cloud account for safe keeping
If by illegal content you mean copyrighted content, when it comes to images, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about it. It is culturally accepted, even by a lot of copyright holders. Plus, there are a ton of free image hosts that allow uploading and sharing an unlimited amount of photos.
If by illegal you are referring to sexual abuse content, then I get it. But admittedly, and perhaps naively, I am shocked that many Ente users would use it for that. I would hope that those people don’t exist or fall into an infinitesimal quasi non-existent minority.
I know that Filen, the German E2EE cloud service, ran into a similar problem. Share links were once free to all, but then were made exclusive to paid users because of abuse. My understanding was that the abuse of share links was for copyrighted content. But it’s possible that wasn’t the only problem.
Does Ente support HDR, HDR+? I was considering transitioning from my DIY sync setup to Immich/Ente, but Immich doesn’t support encryption and their color management is lacking. As for Ente, i don’t know much about it.
A “device” is determined by the combination of IP address and browser/app (User-Agent). This means:
Same browser on the same network = 1 device
Different browsers on the same device = separate devices
Same browser from different networks (e.g., home vs mobile data) = separate devices
Once a device has accessed the link, it can continue accessing it even if the limit is later reached
They also say that sharing public links is best used in small groups. That would mean that if a free users shares a link in a group with 6 people (6 devices), someone is going to get locked out.
Share links never change
I have also noticed that share links never change. When you deacticate and reactivate a link for an album, it is the URL is the same. At least for free users.
That means that if I share an album link with 2 separate people (2 devices), I cannot set different limits to each person. I cannot grant the first person 3 months access with downloading rights, while simultaneously grant the 2nd person 1 week access with no downloading rights.
Feature request?
In my opinion, we should be able to generate multiple links for the album like some password managers allow you to create different share links for the same item with different limits.
At the very least, every time you create a public link for the same album, it should be a different link.
Is this something that Pro users have or are you on the same boat as us free users?
I’ve tried the public sharing and it is indeed restricted to a low number of people.
I backup my picture to proton drive, but there is no way to share an album with a public link. Album sharing is only possible with proton adresses. I know nobody uses proton around me thus I always needs to create an archive file, reupload only 1 file and share it to get a public link. But then, the experience is not the same, people dont understand an archive (zip) on android (even though there are software for that, and its even built-in in the default file manager).
Thought I could more easily share with ente, but this sharing limit on free account will prevent this.
Perhaps I could purchase 1 month of paid, then go back to free to get public sharing without limit….. But it would not be advantageous for them to offer this to a non paying user.
I’m guessing you shared an album with more than 5 people?
It is not clear to me if the share limit is per link. Suppose you have 6 albums and you create a share link for each. You share each link with only one person. Will it work for the 6th person?
I did not know that.
I have a lifetime Filen account. I haven’t backed up any personal photos on it, but I could if I wanted to. But like Proton Drive, Filen is not specifically designed for photos so the UX doesn’t compare to Ente.
I vaguely remember someone sharing a post about an Ente competitor that looked interesting, but I already forgot the name. If someone remembers, please share.