Everyone loves those end of year music recaps, where your past year unfolds as a collection of songs you almost forgot about. They are fun and playful, but usually come at the cost of handing over a lot of data.
Your listening history is just a tiny slice of your life. Your photos tell a much richer story. They carry the people you spent time with, the places you visited, the little moments. What would a yearly recap built from your photos look like, if it was joyful and still fully private? Last month we set out to answer that and created something we hoped would make people smile when they opened Ente Photos. That is how Ente Rewind 2025 was born.
We decided to structure Ente Rewind as a sequence of cards, each one capturing a different facet of your 2025.
We start with a simple throwback. The first photos you took in 2025 set the tone, and it is surprisingly emotional to see again. From there, we move into some gentle stats about your year in pictures. How many memories you captured, and in what form. Which month was photo taking season for you?
Then we shift the focus to people, because they make the year feel special. We designed cards around the faces that show up in your photos. You see the people who appeared most often, the new faces that entered your life, and the core crew you spent your time with. You get a sense of whether 2025 was about family, friends, colleagues, or some mix of everything.
Places get their own spotlight too. We surface photos from your most common spots and show how your memories spread across them. Maybe you lived at your favorite cafe, maybe you bounced between cities, maybe your backyard quietly stole the show.
Then comes the visual story. We show photos that feel interesting even if you do not remember taking them. Happy faces where everyone is having a good time. Those almost perfect shots where something went amusingly wrong at the last second. The main color palette of your year, and the brightest shots that cut through the timeline.
Finally, we wanted Rewind to land in a place that feels both curated and personal. Toward the end, we show an automatic selection of joy sparking photos. Right after that, we transition into your own favorites collection for 2025. Here is what we found interesting based on the pixels, and here is what you showed you care about.
From a product perspective, this is a recap. From a technical perspective, it is a recap that has to be generated without us ever seeing your photos.
Ente Photos is encrypted. We don’t have unencrypted copies of your photos in our cloud, and we don’t collect any app usage metrics. We don’t know which photos you have, which ones you view the most, or which album you open every day.
What we do have is machine learning that runs locally on your device. For Ente Rewind, we leaned heavily on that groundwork.
We used our existing face recognition to find photos of the people you care about, without any of those faces ever being visible to us. We also experimented with the image embeddings we already compute. By comparing these embeddings against each other and against carefully crafted queries, we can estimate which photos are likely to be visually interesting or joyful. Doing this well meaned combining multiple queries, merging and filtering the results, and making careful selections that feel good.
We cannot look at a random user library and tweak a threshold. That forced us to be creative, to simulate a lot, and to lean on our own libraries when testing. You will know more about how well it works on your photos than we ever can.
A first time experience is shaped as much by sound as by visuals. We did not want Rewind to feel like a static slideshow. We wanted it to feel like a short story about your year.
We decided to create something original that fits the mood of Ente Rewind. This is where we are lucky to have people like Ashil on the team, who not only paints pretty pixels on your screen, but also makes great music. He composed and tuned a custom piece that sits in the background of Rewind. It is has that sentimental feel that matches your vibe, while being subtle enough to not distract from your photos.
If you have been with Ente for a while, you have probably met Ducky. When we started sketching Rewind, it felt obvious that Ducky should show up somewhere.
We placed Ducky at the very end of every Rewind, as a closing badge. The badge fits what you photographed in 2025. Are you a People Person who spent most of the year capturing friends and family? A Portrait Pro with a gallery full of carefully composed faces? A Consistency Champ, Globetrotter, or Minimalist? We designed custom Ducky badges that match the kind of year you had.
The idea is not to score or judge you. It is to give you a small, friendly conclusion to your recap, a character you can recognize and maybe smile at.
Building Ente Rewind 2025 has been an especially joyful project to work on. It combines many things we care about: strong privacy, thoughtful use of private ML, and small product touches that make people feel good. Watching my own Rewind reminded me of how full a year can be.
This is our first Rewind, and we hope to make it a tradition. If you watched yours we would love to hear what you liked, what felt off, and what you wish it did differently, so that we can make next year even better. Come say hi in our community and tell us how your 2025 looked!