Introducing Ente CLI

November 04, 2023

We are excited to introduce Ente’s CLI - a tool to download your data from Ente.

Screenshot of Ente CLI Github repo

Some existing customers might wonder, Ente’s desktop app already allows one-click, incremental exports. So why invest energy into building a CLI client for the same?

Short answer

You deserve it.

Long Answer

You are the hero who has taken on the immense responsibility of providing both privacy and durability for the lifelong memories of your loved ones, and you have trusted us at Ente to assist you on this journey.

We’re very grateful for this trust.

Privacy

Ente provides end-to-end encryption with its open-source clients, and has obtained and published external crypto audits for clients and penetration tests for our servers. We have zero product analytics across our apps. Our marketing person isn't very pleased with some of our decisions, but that's a story for another day.

Durability

We replicate data across three different storage providers (two hot & one cold). We've published an article detailing the steps we have taken to ensure service reliability.

However, when it comes to storing your precious memories, we want to respect your choice of not trusting a single entity and following the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Why build a CLI?

To be honest, our desktop exports work great, especially when compared to the big tech companies, who don't really provide a convenient way to export and maintain a copy of your data. But it does have some limitations:

  1. To export data, you need to install the desktop app with it’s GUI. This can be cumbersome if you want to export data on a headless server. A CLI tool is the simplest solution for this problem.
  2. If you are responsible for taking backups for everyone in your family, using the desktop app becomes challenging as it only supports a single account. With the new CLI tool, you can add multiple accounts and export data for all of them.
  3. The desktop app only allows you to export your photos and videos. The CLI tool will also let you export data for other Ente products.
Upcoming features planned for the Ente CLI include:
  1. Exporting individual albums
  2. Exporting data from Ente Auth
  3. Exporting to an S3 compliant destination
  4. Integration with exiftool to write-back any changes in metadata to the file. Currently the tool exports updates to metadata into a separate sidecar file.

You can request for new features by creating a Github Issue. If you are a programmer, who fancies Go, feel free to raise a PR for any issue or improvement.