The most upvoted feature since we launched Ente was for a way to search through photos by the locations they were clicked at.
This made sense. Most of us associate our memories with the places we made them. So we quickly added a feature where you could enter a location name, and the app would filter out photos clicked at that location.
But this had a problem. You see, photos don't contain the names, but only coordinates of their location. So to perform a search, the apps would have to send your search query to our servers to convert it into coordinates (geocoding) that could be used to filter locations that fell within that area.
There is beauty in having zero knowledge of your data, and we wanted to keep things that way. So we dropped this implementation, and the original problem resurfaced. You could no longer filter photos with their location.
Until now.
Introducing, Location Tags – a privacy friendly way to search through your Photos by their location.
You can now tag a photo with a location name, and define a radius to it. ente will automatically cluster all photos that fall within this radius under that location.
Open a photo, and click on Info > Add location to create your first location
tag!
Your searches will run locally on your device, and your location tags are stored end-to-end encrypted. So Ente will have zero knowledge of your locations or search history 😊
In hindsight all of this sounds obvious, but this was a novel feature for us to design and build, and for now we are happy with the outcome. It might take you a few minutes to tag the places that are important to you (home, office, your vacation spots), but at the end of which your library will feel way more organized than it did before. We hope you'll find this feature useful!
We are sure that there is room for improvement, so if you have feedback, please let us know!