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?
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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
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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.
I meant either of those options and the extend of it.
And i totally wouldnt be suprised. Maybe that is my background as moderator and infosec person. It unfortunately is not an uncommon tho happen.
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.