I got back into product design at Ente after a while, and the last few weeks have been a blast.

Our latest release includes a lot of improvements - big and small - many of which I've personally been looking forward to for a while.

Interact with memories

Our pursuit of building the best photos app has pushed us to understand how to curate memories we're grateful for.

While solo trips invoke a certain sense of gratitude for existence, there is more depth to the moments that were shared with someone else. Regardless of how picture im-perfect these moments were, glimpses to shared existence are more grounding.

To help leverage this understanding, we have added the ability to comment, react and kick start a conversation on shared memories. This brings your memory back into the feed of everyone you've shared them with.

Share memories

Not everyone is on Ente, unfortunately.

So we've made it easier to select and share specific memories from the sets we curate. We've also polished the view that's presented to your friends when they view your memories.

This is one of my favorite layouts for shared links we've built so far. If you have more ideas on how we could present your photos, let us know!

Save contacts

I had spoken about setting avatars for contacts a while ago.

We've now made it much easier to connect faces with your contacts, so you no longer have to look at email addresses and dummy avatars.

New photo viewer

We've also revamped our photo viewer and the information sheet attached to it.

It's surprisingly difficult to present all the information connected to a photo (names, timestamps, locations, albums, people, ...) without overwhelming the interface, and we're happy with what we've crafted.

Import improvements

We've revamped the upload experience on Desktop to make the process more reliable and easier to understand.

We've also simplified importing from Google Photos - supporting favorites and partner shared items, so they reflect on Ente Photos as well.

More

Of course there's more!

• Faster photo loading, with smarter cache management that consumes less space on your device.
• Improved OCR, with a more reliable interaction (just long-press to select).
• Nicer dummy avatar colors, although you really should consider connecting their faces now!
• More reliable background sync, with fixes for crashes in the background, apologies to those who were facing them.
• New changelog screen, that sparks joy!
• Polished desktop experience, with improvements to the machine learning pipeline and rendering of archived albums, file-info panel, shared file actions, add person screen, toasts and more.

What's next

It was nice to write this post, thanks to the wonderful product work from the small team at Ente, who are already working on the next set of improvements.

We're tightening the system integration on Android, speeding up on-device machine learning, pushing towards feature parity on desktop, improving sharing with family members and designing ways to help you clean up your library - in a fun way! More on that in a few weeks.

If you'd like to influence our product roadmap or get early updates on the new spaces we're venturing into, join our community.