9 ms·

> You are Apple. You want to make search work like magic in the Photos app, so the user can find all their “dog” pictures with ease. What if you're a user and

> You are Apple. You want to make search work like magic in the Photos app, so the user can find all their “dog” pictures with ease. What if you're a user and you don't care about searching for "dog" in your own photos, you might not even use the Photos app, but apple still scans all your photos and sends data off device without asking you? Perhaps this complicated dance works, perhaps they have made no mistakes, perhaps no one hacks or coerces the relay host providers... they could still have just asked for consent the first time you open Photos (if you ever do) before starting the scan.

plandis 2y ago
You can vote with your wallet and get a Pine Phone or something similar, I guess.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
voidUpdate 2y ago
Android does this too. I don't really want all my photos indexed like that, I just want a linear timeline of photos, but I cant turn off their "memories" thing or all the analysis they do to them
- buran77 2y ago
  The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date". My old Android with whatever Photos app came with it (not Google's) shows this despite being disconnected for so long. There's nothing stopping either Apple or Google from giving users an option to just disable these connected features, globally or per-app. Just allow a "no cloud services" toggle switch in the Photos app, get the warning that $FEATURES will stop working, and be done. I know why Google isn't doing this, they're definitely monetizing every bit of that analyzed content. Not really sure about Apple though, might be that they consider their setup with HE as being on par with no cloud connectivity privacy wise.
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    "memories" constantly given me notifications about "similar shots" at random, so I'm assuming it is trying to analyse the content of the photos. I managed to disable the notifications, but not the actual analysis
  - Someone 2y ago
    > The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date". It’s more. It also can create memories “trip to New York in 2020”, “Cityscapes in New York over the years”, or “Peter over the years” (with Peter being a person added to Photos)
- Aachen 2y ago
  No Android phone I've ever owned automatically uploaded your photos without asking. What exactly do you mean that it does too?
- ranguna 2y ago
  Uninstall Google photos and install a dumb photos app. I think most android phones don't even come with Google photos pre installed.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
    Dumb Photo App by Nefarious DataExfiltration Co & Son
    - tcfhgj 2y ago
      Fossify gallery
    - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
      This is what the "Allow Network permission" checkbox in the app installation dialog on GrapheneOS is for.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- y04nn 2y ago
  I don't think Android does that. It's only Google Photo and only if you upload them to the cloud, if you don't sync/upload them, you can't search them with specific terms.
- lucideer 2y ago
  Android doesn't do this. Everything is opt-in. Granted they require you to opt-in in order for the photos app to be usable & if you go out of your way to avoid opting in they make your photo-browsing life miserable with prompts & notifications. But you do still have to opt-in.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    A number of good third-party photo-browsing apps make it non-miserable, even if you never open Google Photos or even uninstall it.
    - lucideer 2y ago
      I've seen a lot of people saying this generally but no specific recommendations. I've used Simple Gallery Pro before but it's not very good. Currently using Immich but that's not really a general photo app - it's got a narrow use case - so I still use the Google Photos app alongside it quite often. Specific alternative recommendations that aren't malware welcome.
      - marmight 2y ago
        It depends which features you need, but interestingly Google has another, lighter weight gallery app called Google Gallery that does not have any cloud features built in.
      - ckae 2y ago
        Fossify Gallery (on Fdroid or Google store) works quite nicely for me as a nice and simple photo viewer and management app.
      - nine_k 2y ago
        Simple Gallery Pro is what I use, and it seems fine to me. What do you think should be added to it, or altered? Just curious how other people see UX.
      - pertique 2y ago
        I can't personally vouch for it as I'm still stuck in Google Photos and would prefer to self-host it, but Ente may interest you. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, self-host or cloud.
- numpad0 2y ago
  uninstall(disable) stock Google Photos app and install `gallery2.apk`. You can download one from sketchy github repos, or I think you can alternatively extract from Emulator image.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Why, install a non-sketchy open-source gallery app from F-Droid.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Samsung at least does these "dog" cataloguing & searches entirely on-device, as trivially checked by disabling all network connectivity and taking a picture. It may ping home for several other reasons, though.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Does or doesn't. You can't really tell if and when it does any cataloguing; best I've managed to observe is that you can increase chances of it happening if you keep your phone plugged in to a charger for extended periods of time. That's the problem with all those implementations: no feedback of any kind. No list of recognized tags. No information of what is or is to be processed. No nothing. Just magic that doesn't work.
    - reaperman 2y ago
      With embeddings, there might not be tags to display. Instead of labeling the photo with a tag of “dog”, it might just check whether the embedding of each photo is within some vector distance of the embedding of your search text.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yes and no. Embeddings can be used in both directions - if you can find images closest to some entries in a search text, you can also identify tokens or phrases closest in space to any image or cluster of images, and output that. It's a problem long solved in many different ways, including but not limited to e.g.: https://github.com/pythongosssss/ComfyUI-WD14-Tagger https://github.com/pythongosssss/ComfyUI-WD14-Tagger which uses specific models to generate proper booru tags out of any image you pass to it. More importantly, I know for sure they have this capability in practice, because if you tap the right way in the right app, when the Moon is in just the right phase, both Samsung Gallery and OneDrive Photos does (or in case of OneDrive, used to): - Provide occasional completions and suggestions for predefined categories, like "sunset" or "outwear" or "people", etc.; - Auto-tag photos with some subset of those (OneDrive, which also sometimes records it in metadata), or if you use "edit tag" options, suggest best fitting tags (Samsung); - Have a semi-random list of "Things" to choose from to categorize your photos, such as "Sunsets", "City", "Outdoors", "Room", etc. Google Photos does that one too. This shows they do maintain a list of correct and recommended classifications. They just choose to keep it hidden. With regards to face recognition, it's even worse. There's zero controls and zero information other than occasionally matched (and often mismatched) face under photo properties, that you can sometimes delete.
oulipo 2y ago
Well, not vouching for automated scanning or whatever, but the advantage of homomorphic encryption is that besides the power usage for the computation and the bandwidth to transmit the data, Apple doesn't learn anything about what's in your photos, only you can. So even if you don't use the feature, the impact is minimal for you
zombot 2y ago
Exactly, I don't want my shit sent all across the internet without my explicit prior consent, period. No amount of explanation can erase Apple's fuck-up.
- api 2y ago
  Not wrong, but it’s interesting that Apple gets so much flak for this when Google and Microsoft don’t even try. If anything they try to invade privacy as much as possible. Of course maybe that question has its own answer. Apple markets itself as the last personal computing company where you are the customer not the product so they are held to a higher standard. What they should do Is do the processing locally while the phone is plugged in, and just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.
  - yard2010 2y ago
    In other words: don't hate the player hate game, but the point still stands.
    - drawkward 2y ago
      The game, unlike Apple's policy, is opt-in. Hate the player and the game.
  - okamiueru 2y ago
    Whataboutisms aren't all the great you know. Google and MS also get flak, and they also deserve it. But now that we're talking about these differences, I'd say that Apple users are notoriously complacent and defend Apple and their practices. So, perhaps in some part it is in an attempt to compensate for that? I'm still surprised how we've now accepted that Apple receives information pretty much every time we run a process (or rather, if it ran more than 12 hours ago, or has been changed).
  - BlackFly 2y ago
    Well when you are building a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates), and they complain about the most basic faux pas that you could do in their culture (not asking them before you phone home with data derived from their data)... you have invited these people to criticise you. Most people I know of wouldn't care about such a feature other than a breathless sort of "Wow, Apple tech!" So they are building something which is intended to win over privacy conscious people, kudos to them, everyone stands to benefit. But the most basic custom in that subculture is consent. So they built something really great and then clumsily failed on the easiest detail because it is so meaningless to everyone except that target audience. To that audience, they don't bother criticising google or microsoft (again) because it goes without saying that those companies are terrible, it doesn't need to be said again.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
What if you're a user and you're fed up with all the "magic"? What if you want a device that works reliably, consistently, and in ways you can understand from empirical observation if you pay attention? Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, they all seem to be tripping over each other in an effort to make this whole thing just as much ass-backwards as possible. Here is how it, IMHO, should work: 1) It scans stuff, detects faces and features. Locally or in the cloud or not at all, as governed by an explicit opt-in setting. 2) Fuck search. Search is not discoverable. I want to browse stuff. I want a list of objects/tags/concepts it recognized. I want a list of faces it recognized and the ability to manually retag them, and manually mark any that they missed. And not just a list of 10 categories the vendor thinks are most interesting. All of them. Alphabetically. 3) If you insist on search, make it work. I type in a word, I want all photos tagged with it. I click on a face, I want all photos that have matching face on it. Simple as that. Not "eventual consistency", not "keep refreshing, every 5th refresh I may show you a result", or other such breakage that's a staple experience of OneDrive Photos in particular. Don't know about Apple, but Google, Microsoft and Samsung all refuse #2, and spectacularly fail at #3, and the way it works, I'm convinced it's intentional, as I can't even conceptualize a design that would exhibit such failures naturally. EDIT: 4) (A cherry on a cake of making a sane product that works) Recognition data is stored in photo metadata, whether directly or in a sidecar file, in any of a bunch of formats sane people use, and is both exported along with the photos, and adhered to when importing new photos.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  > What if you're a user and you're fed up with all the "magic"? This is a completely hypothetical scenario. If users with such requirements actually existed, PinePhones and similar devices would be significantly more popular.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's not hypothetical. Plenty of open source software tries to address it. For example, DigiKam does everything I listed 100% right. Problem is, it's desktop-only and geared for local photos. An equivalent solution could exist for phones and handle cloud albums, but the mobile and cloud vendors don't want to do it, and make it hard on purpose for any third party to try.
tempworkac 2y ago
It doesn't really matter if they ask you or not, ultimately you have to trust them, and if you don't trust Apple, why would you even use an iPhone?
- chikere232 2y ago
  As they didn't ask, I will trust them less
  - tempworkac 2y ago
    why use a device by someone you don't trust? honestly don't get it. I'd use an open source android distro
    - drawkward 2y ago
      I am merely a data scientist, so don't really know a ton about mainline programming beyond a few intro CS courses. Why would an open source android distro be more trustworthy?
      - subjectsigma 2y ago
        Here is my simplified take on it which will likely get me flamed. Trust has many meanings but for this discussion we’ll consider privacy and security. As in, I trust my phone to not do something malicious as a result of outside influence, and I trust it to not leak data that I don’t want other people to know. Open source software is not inherently more secure nor more private. However it can sometimes be more secure (because more people are helping find bugs, because that specific project prioritizes security, etc.) and is usually more private. Why? Because it (usually) isn’t controlled by a single central entity, which means there is (usually) no incentive to collect user data. In reality it’s all kind of a mess and means nothing. There’s tons of bugs in open source software, and projects like Audacity prove they sometimes violate user privacy. HN-type people consider open source software more secure and private because you can view the source code yourself, but I guarantee you they have not personally reviewed the source of all the software they use. If you want to use an open-source Android distro I think you would learn a lot. You don’t need to have a CS degree. However unless you made massive lifestyle changes in addition to changing your phone, I’m not confident it would meaningfully make you more secure or private.
abtinf 2y ago
So don’t use the photos app. Just get an alternative camera app and you bypass all of this.
- thisislife2 2y ago
  It's opt-in by default so you can't "bypass" it unless you are aware that you can turn it off. If you don't turn it off, it will continue to scan your photos, and upload the data to Apple, whether you use the Photos app or not. (And, by the way, if the option to "learn from this app" is enabled (which is again, by default opt-in) iPadOS / ios also will be intrusively data collecting how you use that alternative camera app too ...
Raymond122 2y ago
[dead]
prophesi 2y ago
A quick shoutout to Ente Photos[0]. FOSS with an opt-in locally-run semantic search of your photos. The first encoding with a ton of photos may take a few minutes in the background, but after that it takes no time with subsequent photo uploads. I'm not sure why Apple is going through the trouble of uploading the photos and incorporating homomorphic encryption for something this simple, particularly with their push for local AI and their Neural Engine[2]. I also appreciate Ente's Guest View[1] that lets you select the photos you want to show someone in person on your phone to prevent the issue of them scrolling too far. [0] https://github.com/ente-io/ente https://github.com/ente-io/ente [1] https://ente.io/blog/guest-view/ https://ente.io/blog/guest-view/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Engine

plandis 2y ago

You can vote with your wallet and get a Pine Phone or something similar, I guess.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

voidUpdate 2y ago

Android does this too. I don't really want all my photos indexed like that, I just want a linear timeline of photos, but I cant turn off their "memories" thing or all the analysis they do to them

buran77 2y ago
The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date". My old Android with whatever Photos app came with it (not Google's) shows this despite being disconnected for so long. There's nothing stopping either Apple or Google from giving users an option to just disable these connected features, globally or per-app. Just allow a "no cloud services" toggle switch in the Photos app, get the warning that $FEATURES will stop working, and be done. I know why Google isn't doing this, they're definitely monetizing every bit of that analyzed content. Not really sure about Apple though, might be that they consider their setup with HE as being on par with no cloud connectivity privacy wise.
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  "memories" constantly given me notifications about "similar shots" at random, so I'm assuming it is trying to analyse the content of the photos. I managed to disable the notifications, but not the actual analysis
- Someone 2y ago
  > The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date". It’s more. It also can create memories “trip to New York in 2020”, “Cityscapes in New York over the years”, or “Peter over the years” (with Peter being a person added to Photos)
Aachen 2y ago
No Android phone I've ever owned automatically uploaded your photos without asking. What exactly do you mean that it does too?
ranguna 2y ago
Uninstall Google photos and install a dumb photos app. I think most android phones don't even come with Google photos pre installed.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
  Dumb Photo App by Nefarious DataExfiltration Co & Son
  - tcfhgj 2y ago
    Fossify gallery
  - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
    This is what the "Allow Network permission" checkbox in the app installation dialog on GrapheneOS is for.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
y04nn 2y ago
I don't think Android does that. It's only Google Photo and only if you upload them to the cloud, if you don't sync/upload them, you can't search them with specific terms.
lucideer 2y ago
Android doesn't do this. Everything is opt-in. Granted they require you to opt-in in order for the photos app to be usable & if you go out of your way to avoid opting in they make your photo-browsing life miserable with prompts & notifications. But you do still have to opt-in.
- nine_k 2y ago
  A number of good third-party photo-browsing apps make it non-miserable, even if you never open Google Photos or even uninstall it.
  - lucideer 2y ago
    I've seen a lot of people saying this generally but no specific recommendations. I've used Simple Gallery Pro before but it's not very good. Currently using Immich but that's not really a general photo app - it's got a narrow use case - so I still use the Google Photos app alongside it quite often. Specific alternative recommendations that aren't malware welcome.
    - marmight 2y ago
      It depends which features you need, but interestingly Google has another, lighter weight gallery app called Google Gallery that does not have any cloud features built in.
    - ckae 2y ago
      Fossify Gallery (on Fdroid or Google store) works quite nicely for me as a nice and simple photo viewer and management app.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Simple Gallery Pro is what I use, and it seems fine to me. What do you think should be added to it, or altered? Just curious how other people see UX.
    - pertique 2y ago
      I can't personally vouch for it as I'm still stuck in Google Photos and would prefer to self-host it, but Ente may interest you. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, self-host or cloud.
numpad0 2y ago
uninstall(disable) stock Google Photos app and install `gallery2.apk`. You can download one from sketchy github repos, or I think you can alternatively extract from Emulator image.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Why, install a non-sketchy open-source gallery app from F-Droid.
AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Samsung at least does these "dog" cataloguing & searches entirely on-device, as trivially checked by disabling all network connectivity and taking a picture. It may ping home for several other reasons, though.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Does or doesn't. You can't really tell if and when it does any cataloguing; best I've managed to observe is that you can increase chances of it happening if you keep your phone plugged in to a charger for extended periods of time. That's the problem with all those implementations: no feedback of any kind. No list of recognized tags. No information of what is or is to be processed. No nothing. Just magic that doesn't work.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    With embeddings, there might not be tags to display. Instead of labeling the photo with a tag of “dog”, it might just check whether the embedding of each photo is within some vector distance of the embedding of your search text.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Yes and no. Embeddings can be used in both directions - if you can find images closest to some entries in a search text, you can also identify tokens or phrases closest in space to any image or cluster of images, and output that. It's a problem long solved in many different ways, including but not limited to e.g.: https://github.com/pythongosssss/ComfyUI-WD14-Tagger https://github.com/pythongosssss/ComfyUI-WD14-Tagger which uses specific models to generate proper booru tags out of any image you pass to it. More importantly, I know for sure they have this capability in practice, because if you tap the right way in the right app, when the Moon is in just the right phase, both Samsung Gallery and OneDrive Photos does (or in case of OneDrive, used to): - Provide occasional completions and suggestions for predefined categories, like "sunset" or "outwear" or "people", etc.; - Auto-tag photos with some subset of those (OneDrive, which also sometimes records it in metadata), or if you use "edit tag" options, suggest best fitting tags (Samsung); - Have a semi-random list of "Things" to choose from to categorize your photos, such as "Sunsets", "City", "Outdoors", "Room", etc. Google Photos does that one too. This shows they do maintain a list of correct and recommended classifications. They just choose to keep it hidden. With regards to face recognition, it's even worse. There's zero controls and zero information other than occasionally matched (and often mismatched) face under photo properties, that you can sometimes delete.

oulipo 2y ago

Well, not vouching for automated scanning or whatever, but the advantage of homomorphic encryption is that besides the power usage for the computation and the bandwidth to transmit the data, Apple doesn't learn anything about what's in your photos, only you can. So even if you don't use the feature, the impact is minimal for you

zombot 2y ago

Exactly, I don't want my shit sent all across the internet without my explicit prior consent, period. No amount of explanation can erase Apple's fuck-up.

api 2y ago
Not wrong, but it’s interesting that Apple gets so much flak for this when Google and Microsoft don’t even try. If anything they try to invade privacy as much as possible. Of course maybe that question has its own answer. Apple markets itself as the last personal computing company where you are the customer not the product so they are held to a higher standard. What they should do Is do the processing locally while the phone is plugged in, and just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.
- yard2010 2y ago
  In other words: don't hate the player hate game, but the point still stands.
  - drawkward 2y ago
    The game, unlike Apple's policy, is opt-in. Hate the player and the game.
- okamiueru 2y ago
  Whataboutisms aren't all the great you know. Google and MS also get flak, and they also deserve it. But now that we're talking about these differences, I'd say that Apple users are notoriously complacent and defend Apple and their practices. So, perhaps in some part it is in an attempt to compensate for that? I'm still surprised how we've now accepted that Apple receives information pretty much every time we run a process (or rather, if it ran more than 12 hours ago, or has been changed).
- BlackFly 2y ago
  Well when you are building a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates), and they complain about the most basic faux pas that you could do in their culture (not asking them before you phone home with data derived from their data)... you have invited these people to criticise you. Most people I know of wouldn't care about such a feature other than a breathless sort of "Wow, Apple tech!" So they are building something which is intended to win over privacy conscious people, kudos to them, everyone stands to benefit. But the most basic custom in that subculture is consent. So they built something really great and then clumsily failed on the easiest detail because it is so meaningless to everyone except that target audience. To that audience, they don't bother criticising google or microsoft (again) because it goes without saying that those companies are terrible, it doesn't need to be said again.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

What if you're a user and you're fed up with all the "magic"? What if you want a device that works reliably, consistently, and in ways you can understand from empirical observation if you pay attention? Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, they all seem to be tripping over each other in an effort to make this whole thing just as much ass-backwards as possible. Here is how it, IMHO, should work: 1) It scans stuff, detects faces and features. Locally or in the cloud or not at all, as governed by an explicit opt-in setting. 2) Fuck search. Search is not discoverable. I want to browse stuff. I want a list of objects/tags/concepts it recognized. I want a list of faces it recognized and the ability to manually retag them, and manually mark any that they missed. And not just a list of 10 categories the vendor thinks are most interesting. All of them. Alphabetically. 3) If you insist on search, make it work. I type in a word, I want all photos tagged with it. I click on a face, I want all photos that have matching face on it. Simple as that. Not "eventual consistency", not "keep refreshing, every 5th refresh I may show you a result", or other such breakage that's a staple experience of OneDrive Photos in particular. Don't know about Apple, but Google, Microsoft and Samsung all refuse #2, and spectacularly fail at #3, and the way it works, I'm convinced it's intentional, as I can't even conceptualize a design that would exhibit such failures naturally. EDIT: 4) (A cherry on a cake of making a sane product that works) Recognition data is stored in photo metadata, whether directly or in a sidecar file, in any of a bunch of formats sane people use, and is both exported along with the photos, and adhered to when importing new photos.

warkdarrior 2y ago
> What if you're a user and you're fed up with all the "magic"? This is a completely hypothetical scenario. If users with such requirements actually existed, PinePhones and similar devices would be significantly more popular.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It's not hypothetical. Plenty of open source software tries to address it. For example, DigiKam does everything I listed 100% right. Problem is, it's desktop-only and geared for local photos. An equivalent solution could exist for phones and handle cloud albums, but the mobile and cloud vendors don't want to do it, and make it hard on purpose for any third party to try.

tempworkac 2y ago

It doesn't really matter if they ask you or not, ultimately you have to trust them, and if you don't trust Apple, why would you even use an iPhone?

chikere232 2y ago
As they didn't ask, I will trust them less
- tempworkac 2y ago
  why use a device by someone you don't trust? honestly don't get it. I'd use an open source android distro
  - drawkward 2y ago
    I am merely a data scientist, so don't really know a ton about mainline programming beyond a few intro CS courses. Why would an open source android distro be more trustworthy?
    - subjectsigma 2y ago
      Here is my simplified take on it which will likely get me flamed. Trust has many meanings but for this discussion we’ll consider privacy and security. As in, I trust my phone to not do something malicious as a result of outside influence, and I trust it to not leak data that I don’t want other people to know. Open source software is not inherently more secure nor more private. However it can sometimes be more secure (because more people are helping find bugs, because that specific project prioritizes security, etc.) and is usually more private. Why? Because it (usually) isn’t controlled by a single central entity, which means there is (usually) no incentive to collect user data. In reality it’s all kind of a mess and means nothing. There’s tons of bugs in open source software, and projects like Audacity prove they sometimes violate user privacy. HN-type people consider open source software more secure and private because you can view the source code yourself, but I guarantee you they have not personally reviewed the source of all the software they use. If you want to use an open-source Android distro I think you would learn a lot. You don’t need to have a CS degree. However unless you made massive lifestyle changes in addition to changing your phone, I’m not confident it would meaningfully make you more secure or private.

abtinf 2y ago

So don’t use the photos app. Just get an alternative camera app and you bypass all of this.

thisislife2 2y ago
It's opt-in by default so you can't "bypass" it unless you are aware that you can turn it off. If you don't turn it off, it will continue to scan your photos, and upload the data to Apple, whether you use the Photos app or not. (And, by the way, if the option to "learn from this app" is enabled (which is again, by default opt-in) iPadOS / ios also will be intrusively data collecting how you use that alternative camera app too ...

Raymond122 2y ago

[dead]

prophesi 2y ago

A quick shoutout to Ente Photos[0]. FOSS with an opt-in locally-run semantic search of your photos. The first encoding with a ton of photos may take a few minutes in the background, but after that it takes no time with subsequent photo uploads. I'm not sure why Apple is going through the trouble of uploading the photos and incorporating homomorphic encryption for something this simple, particularly with their push for local AI and their Neural Engine[2]. I also appreciate Ente's Guest View[1] that lets you select the photos you want to show someone in person on your phone to prevent the issue of them scrolling too far. [0] https://github.com/ente-io/ente https://github.com/ente-io/ente [1] https://ente.io/blog/guest-view/ https://ente.io/blog/guest-view/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Engine