Google Photos is the wrong product to ask this question, IMHO. One of its key highlight is sharing albums with others and preserving them for the future, so why

Google Photos is the wrong product to ask this question, IMHO. One of its key highlight is sharing albums with others and preserving them for the future, so why waste a consumer device's energy on unnecessary tasks if the image is going to end in a Google datacenter anyway? Google Lens, which isn't about sharing, does run many functions on device: for example, it does ondevice offline translation: https://9to5google.com/2021/01/25/google-lens-translate-offline/ https://9to5google.com/2021/01/25/google-lens-translate-offl... The general direction at Google (https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/improved-on-device-ml-on-pixel-6-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/improved-on-device-ml-on-p...) is to move as much as possible on device for privacy and latency reasons. There are published and opensource (Apache license, according to the github LICENSE file) models for Tensorflow Lite which runs on Pixel Edge TPUs (and most embedded devices): https://tfhub.dev/s?q=edgetpu https://tfhub.dev/s?q=edgetpu https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/projects/edgetpu/ https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/pr...