Additional layer of privacy/protection for albums

[stephenlindauer]

Full disclosure, I discovered Ente yesterday and am still exploring it. I'm considering using it for sharing baby/kid photos with family members.

My big concern is family members downloading/sharing photos on social media after I spend all the time to setup albums/sharing on Ente. We're trying to be privacy centric with kid photos and want to keep the majority of them off social media. I'm an app developer and was planning on building my own app when I found Ente which has 95% of what I'm looking for already. The one gap I see is that I want to disallow saving/exporting photos from the app. Family can view only, but not save them (so they aren't tempted to share elsewhere). This would also include screenshot detection to report if family is doing that to subvert the no-download part.

I see this as being a special extra-security/privacy feature where you can lock down specific albums with this mode. Does something like this already exist? Is it on anyone's radar? If I was interested in putting together some PRs to add this, would there be support from the dev team to get something like this going, and if so, any recommendations before I start?

Thanks!

[vishnukvmd]

Hey, thanks for the feedback, this wasn't on our radar.

We'd be happy to support, but preventing screenshots / exports on web / desktop would be non-trivial.

[stephenlindauer]

Absolutely, I wasn't even considering support for this on web. I was considering self-hosting my own server and not even allowing the web interface so the problem is avoided, so for my use case it's fine. (Everyone in my family would happily use the app only.) For bigger picture / more general use, I wonder if there could be an option to disallow viewing these sensitive albums from web/desktop completely. I understand that might not be an ideal solution for such a niche feature, and not everyone would need that level of precise control. Do you have any thoughts there?

[vishnukvmd]

I think adding this feature while communicating the caveats will increase the complexity of our interface, and potentially mislead users (who might not fully understand the caveats).

[derwebcoder]

I have the exact same use case and concern. If it would be possible to disable sharing for some users that would be nice.
mobile app, downloads and sharing would cover at least all my needs. Web UI and preventing screenshots are more nice to have for my case.
From my point of view this feature would fit perfectly with the privacy aspect of ente.
thank you for this really nice app!