Ente Photo Initial Impressions
Some might not see the point in having a dedicated cloud storage solution for your photos since nearly everyone on this planet has a gmail account and some form of access to Google Photos. I’ve been using Google Photos since 2008, at least. It’s taken lots of planning and time to complete my full migration over to Ente Photo, but I couldn’t be happier with the results so far after a month. I’ll be sure to do a long term review after I’ve settled into the service. Also, full disclosure, I’m not sponsored by Ente or anything like that. This is just my attempt at spreading the word for a service that I think is doing things the right way. I pay for my Ente subscription, full stop.
For the uninitiated, let’s start off with the basics: what is Ente?
Ente Photo is, as far as I can tell, Google Photos without the Google. If you know how to use Google Photo, you can use Ente. Ente is a cloud storage service for your photos, though my Google Photo library migration included some small video clips which so far have all played fine directly in Ente without issue. You can set up folders and share them with others, collaborate, or create public links. I generally don’t share directly with others outside of some family and friends, but it’s nice that the options are there. You can de-duplicate photos easily. You can set up a family and share a pool of cloud data, but each person still manages their own account. Everything works in a very logical manner, just about how you would expect each function to work. They offer a free account, so I recommend that you give them a try. For the privacy conscious, Ente does not use your photos in any way that I can tell from their privacy policy and terms of service.
Ente Photo’s main menu
I haven’t found any issues that would stop me from recommending this service. If I do, I’ll update this post appropriately. For now, Ente is worth checking out. You get total control over your photos and how they are used. You can easily share photos just like you can with Google Photo. And Ente has a pipeline of new features that keep rolling in. I’ve already converted my wife to Ente and she seems pretty happy with it so far. That’s about as much praise as I can give any service nowadays to be honest. So, if you are tired of being hostage to Google, here is one option to help break away.
Ente in a nutshell
They are a privacy-focused cloud photo service that replicates a lot of the core features of Google Photo and even looks like a more streamlined version
They offer a free tier that comes with 10gb of “forever” storage
Ente’s paid tiers (as of 1/18/2026) cost:
$2.49/mo for 50gb
$4.00/mo for 200gb
$9.99/mo for 1000gb
$19.00/mo for 2000gb
Ente has AI features including on device face detection, but to be honest I haven’t tried these features out yet
You can share photos or albums directly via public or private links
Ente offers family plans, but instead of charging per user, you can share a single subscription with up to 5 other people (each person gets their own account and can only access their photos; you just share the pool of overall storage that the subscriber is paying for)
Ente claims to have no ads, no tracking, and to not use photos for any AI training. This will be the real test for Ente. Please stay true to these claims!
Ente is open source, audited, and apparently also fully self-hostable. That is a huge offering and something I want to look into more.
So far, so good, right? I honestly am trying to poke holes in the service. I haven’t had any bugs or crashes of note. No broken uploads. Photos look great in-browser. Uploads are decently fast and files are capped at 10gb (!). Ente doesn’t apply any compression algorithms to your photos, so they look the same as the local files as far as I can tell. Try out the free tier and see for yourself. I haven’t uploaded a new photo to Google in months!