Note
Archived discussion. This page is a verbatim copy of a thread from
community.ansel.photos, the Ansel community forum, which ran from March 2023
until it was taken offline in June 2025 after the site was compromised — a counterfeit
site had been planted inside the forum software, so the whole thing had to come down.
The original address was https://community.ansel.photos/view-discussion/installation-file-for-ansel-infected-with.
No crawler ever captured this particular thread, so the text below — taken straight from the forum database — is the only copy left.
Answers may refer to older versions of Ansel, and image attachments did not survive the shutdown. Current discussion happens on GitHub Discussions .
Posted by Charliehaso on 2025-05-14.
Hi there. I’m a new user. I downloaded Ansel (have tried several times) from your website (the Windows 7 - 11 version - for Win 10 host) - 64bit. It comes down as a Zip file. On attempting to install it, Windows defender blocks it (even if you attempt to force run it) informing that its infected. AVAST also says the same thing, says infected with FileRep Malware. Can anyone confirm whats going on?
Replies
Steve — 2025-05-15
zip file ?
I just downloaded the latest ansel-0.0.0+1854.g9a836f7-win64.exe from Release Nightly builds, rolling release · aurelienpierreeng/ansel · GitHub and Windows Defender did not block.
Charliehaso — 2025-05-15
Hi there. Many thanks, I tried the one you mentioned, its being blocked by AVAST file shield now (the original one was from the main website and WF was stopping that first before AVAST went for it).
Aurélien Pierre — 2025-05-15
Those machine learning virus detections are garbage and detect bytes sequences that seem to match known viruses patterns. Ansel is flagged as a malware once every 3-6 months, and then everything is ok again. Those are false positives.