Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301740

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669607

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460893

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

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.

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.

> 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/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397343

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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.

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

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...

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

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-...

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

We'd like to fix the crashes.

Sorry for the troubles.