Machine learning
NOTE
This document describes a beta feature that will be present in an upcoming release.
Ente supports on-device machine learning. This allows you to use the latest advances in AI in a privacy preserving manner.
You can search for your photos by the faces of the people in them. Ente will show you all the faces in a photo, and will also try to group similar faces together to create clusters of people so that you can give them names, and quickly find all photos with a given person in them.
You can search for your photos by typing natural language descriptions of them. For example, you can search for "night", "by the seaside", or "the red motorcycle next to a fountain". Within the app, this ability is sometimes referred to as magic search.
We will build on this foundation to add more forms of advanced search.
You can enable face and magic search in the app's preferences on either the mobile app or the desktop app.
If you have a big library, we recommend enabling this on the desktop app first, because it can index your existing photos faster (The app needs to download your originals to index them which can happen faster over WiFi, and indexing is also faster on your computer as compared to your mobile device).
Once your existing photos have been indexed, then you can use either. The mobile app is fast enough to easily and seamlessly index the new photos that you take.
TIP
Even for the initial indexing, you don't necessarily need the desktop app, it just will be a bit faster.
The indexes are synced across all your devices automatically using the same end-to-end encypted security that we use for syncing your photos.
Note that the desktop app does not currently support viewing and modifying the automatically generated face groupings, that is only supported by the mobile app.