My Teenager's Review of Ente's Privacy Photo App

29 Dec, 2025

Full Disclosure: When I contacted Ente with the idea for this review I was given a free family account.

Preamble

Yeah, Look, there's one. It was all like Christmassy things from one year ago. But look, that's where we were building those tiny houses. That's a nice photo.

Yes, it's warm.

Oh, look at my brother's trousers on this.

I know. I love that photo. He was Where's Wally, right?

Yeah. Is that an old Christmas tree, though?

Yeah. That looks like a real one.

Yeah. I remember the year we had a real one, but it kept falling over. So...what's the first question?

How long have you been using Ente?

I don't remember. I've had it for a while. Oh, wait, I can just check when Ente got back to me by email to help me solve those problems. I haven't checked my mail in a while. It was Saturday, 4th of October. It was right after the summer that I installed it. We got a family plan from Ente.

Can you describe what Ente is and makes it different?

What is Ente? It is just like an app where you can store all your photos. It's better for your privacy, because on Google these bots see your photos and stuff. Normally, your photos are in your gallery. But recently, my phone crashed, and if I hadn't had Ente, I would have lost all of them.

Other photo apps, like Google Photos can also save your photos, but with Ente, they store them in a way that they can't see them, even if they tried. That's called encryption.

What was it like to install Ente?

Very easy, just like any other app. But the first time I installed it, I didn't put the password in Bitwarden, and we had to write to them and ask them to reset my account. I couldn't make a new account with my email address, or get out of the old account because part of the privacy aspect is that if you lose your password then they can't help you. You have to start all over. They give you a recovery code for when you forget your password, but I don't remember getting one the first time, or didn't write it down.

After you install Ente, you just have to click on the settings. It shows the different places on your phone where you can get photos from, like WhatsApp videos, WhatsApp images gallery and your camera. Selecting these syncs those albums. It makes sure that what's on the phone is also online. And then you can take more photos and so on.

What were your first impressions?

I liked that there's an option to free up space. It takes all the photos from your phone gallery, and then you can click free up space, which frees up space on your phone, but you still have the photos on Ente. This was helpful because I have so much stuff on my phone, which is now a bit old. It's a Fairphone 3. It has limited storage and I couldn't install any more apps, even though I didn't have that many apps in the first place. The photos and videos were taking up a lot of storage. When I freed up space the first time, it was 11 gigabytes, which is quite a bit.

I now have over 4000 photos in Ente. They call them 'memories'. We have a family shared plan that Ente gave us to try and we can both use the data limit together. It's just you and me at the moment. I think you have way more photos, because you're older.

Earlier this month I couldn't turn my phone on, and it kept telling me to do a factory reset. I lost a lot of things because when you do a factory reset, it wipes all the data. But with Ente, it was easy to get my photos back. I just installed the app, logged in again, and everything was there, online.

What can you say about the interface?

Navigating is good. The scrolling feels easy.

I like that it shows your photos by date. I just need to sort out which WhatsApp photos I don't want. I like the general experience: you scroll up and then it organizes your photos by date. It also shows you photos from a year ago, or 12 years ago. I like that too, because it reminds you of those times.

Organising photos by date is also useful, for example, when I don't exactly remember the exact day that I took a photo, but I know it was in the summer or something, so then I just scroll to the summer and quickly find the photo that way.

It would be cool if you had a widget, though. Right now you have to open the app to see the photos in this way, but a widget on your phone that shows the photos from this time last year would be nice. Maybe they'll add that.

You can, but that I don't like as much. It's just easier to send the photo, so people can instantly save it or look at it. You can send multiple photos to someone with Ente, but it shows them a link, sometimes with a kind of album cover. But I prefer just sending them the photos directly via WhatsApp or Signal.

Do you know about the collaborative album feature?

You told me you can make an album and people can add their photos, yeah. But I think I will probably just ask people to send me photos and then it would sync to my device and then I'd group them together myself, so I don't really see a use for creating a collaborative folder. It's a good idea. I just don't see myself doing that.

You explained to me my friends wouldn't have to make an account with Ente to collaborate, because that would maybe a barrier or too much work if they don't want the app, but I just don't see my friends doing that. I think they find it easier just to send photos. I don't know if I can think of a use for this type of folder.

Why did we recently install Ente on your laptop?

That was so that we could turn on the AI feature. It took a day or two to scan all the photos. Now that that's done, it shows you faces of different people and then you click on that face and it shows you all the photos where they're in. And once it is scanned, you can see the AI feature on your phone too. You don't have to do the scan there.

One thing that is annoying is that it has a face of me now and a face of me then. There are three versions of me in there of different ages.

In general, I don't really use my laptop that much, only for things like Netflix. It can be nicer to see the photos on a bigger screen, but I don't think I'll use Ente on my laptop much.

Is there anything that didn't work well?

The main frustration is that I couldn't watch videos. It would still play the audio on my phone and show a black screen. When I mailed them, they responded quickly. It was mainly me that didn't respond back. Sometimes I waited a very, very long time to respond, even though I did want to get back to them.

I don't like email that much. It all feels boring. Or maybe I need to organize my mails because it feels a bit chaotic. There is all this random stuff in my inbox. I know you can make folders, but I don't.

They gave good information about the video problem. I first had to enable stream mode, or something like that, and then click to stream the video, but it didn't work. It still doesn't work, and that's annoying, because I want to watch my videos on my phone, because it's easier when I am out, for example. I can watch my videos on my laptop, but they should fix this so it works on my phone too.

Do you think your friends would use Ente?

No. They're just all stuck with Google. They use Google Photos even though you can download Ente from the Google Play Store. But I don't know. They won't do it.

There is not much Ente can do about this, even though some of my friends' parents are worried about privacy. Some of my friends have Signal, but they mostly don't use it. I think it's because it's mainly what's popular that they choose.