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I honestly can't imagine how this is true, but of course, experience is a hell of a filter. I use search for everything (though a lot of the time some folders

by jprd 4y ago

I honestly can't imagine how this is true, but of course, experience is a hell of a filter. I use search for everything (though a lot of the time some folders is all that is needed), and Google Photos is a sin greater than Central Air (#Dogma). If you tag faces, Google Photos will go out of its way to find decades old photos of the same person and merge that tag for easy search. It will periodically ask me to validate that a half face in the background from 2004 matches the same person in a full portrait from 2018. I search a loved one, scene or year to go with it and nearly always get what I want back. It gives me Star Trek vibes.

Barrin92 4y ago
If you tag things you're effectively recreating an organizational hierarchy, just with labels instead of literal folders. Plain search itself will always lack the feedback you get from the semantics you create by organizing things, unless you attach metadata to your search in some way. Simple example, you look for a math paper in your paper directory, and you find an even better one that you didn't remember. Of course recommender systems in search help with some of this, but search is mostly literal, it doesn't make connections the way you can. Spotify can give you some popular punk bands that are like the ones you like, but it's unlikely to give you that one record from the local band that nobody else listens to that you manually curated in your playlist 12 years ago.
jonathankoren 4y ago
Image search has a recall problem. This is obvious if you search for a specific photo. I have a photo of my daughter as a toddler wearing a red vest or coat that reads, “Coca-Cola Security Forces” (She was a child soldier in the Cola Wars. Thank her for her service.) I can not search for that photo. I know the picture was taken at my house, but only vaguely when. If I search for her name and location, I’ll get thousands of photos. If I add some years, I get fewer, but not necessarily the one I’m looking for. Add some content descriptors like “red vest” or “red coat”, it’s totally random. Search for the words on the coat? Lol. That’s not indexed. If I breakdown and scroll through the list of thousands of photos, it’s not there. Why isn’t it there? I have no idea. Maybe it’s not facially tagged? Maybe it just ranked low in some algo? No clue. No way even to figure it out. I have to resort scrolling through every photo for the date range to find it. It sucks.

by jprd 4y ago

Barrin92 4y ago

If you tag things you're effectively recreating an organizational hierarchy, just with labels instead of literal folders. Plain search itself will always lack the feedback you get from the semantics you create by organizing things, unless you attach metadata to your search in some way. Simple example, you look for a math paper in your paper directory, and you find an even better one that you didn't remember. Of course recommender systems in search help with some of this, but search is mostly literal, it doesn't make connections the way you can. Spotify can give you some popular punk bands that are like the ones you like, but it's unlikely to give you that one record from the local band that nobody else listens to that you manually curated in your playlist 12 years ago.

jonathankoren 4y ago

Image search has a recall problem. This is obvious if you search for a specific photo. I have a photo of my daughter as a toddler wearing a red vest or coat that reads, “Coca-Cola Security Forces” (She was a child soldier in the Cola Wars. Thank her for her service.) I can not search for that photo. I know the picture was taken at my house, but only vaguely when. If I search for her name and location, I’ll get thousands of photos. If I add some years, I get fewer, but not necessarily the one I’m looking for. Add some content descriptors like “red vest” or “red coat”, it’s totally random. Search for the words on the coat? Lol. That’s not indexed. If I breakdown and scroll through the list of thousands of photos, it’s not there. Why isn’t it there? I have no idea. Maybe it’s not facially tagged? Maybe it just ranked low in some algo? No clue. No way even to figure it out. I have to resort scrolling through every photo for the date range to find it. It sucks.