Comment by voidUpdate 4 days 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
> Google loves doing this.
Tech companies love doing this. Apple does the same, so does Microsoft.
If you know some choice isn't right for you (now or forever), the company is feeling extra beautiful today, and you're in luck, you'll get a "Do this now, or I'll remind you later" choice. But then sometimes they just decide that "This is how things are now".
I've had this happen in every environment except Linux, where I get to shoot myself in the foot whenever I want, and sometimes a bit more.
It says it's "opt in" but as someone who hasn't opted in, I still get the notifications and I can see a split second preview of all the stuff they're not supposed to have computed before it asks me to opt in. So there's DEFINITELY shenanigans ocurring.
A number of good third-party photo-browsing apps make it non-miserable, even if you never open Google Photos or even uninstall it.
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.
you might want to look into fossify.org as simple tools(of which simple gallery pro was a part of) has been sold to an israeli adware company.
see: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
I'm really happy with Immich & not looking for a replacement. Evaluated it vs Ente in the past & went with it instead - as far as I could tell their apps have the same features & limitations (focus on remote backup & display rather than on local on-device photo management & basic markup/editing).
If (like me) you don't need e2e I can highly recommend Immich for its use-case though.
i use aves[1] which has many features. especially useful if you travel and take pictures a lot.
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.
Apple also does the vast majority of photo categorization on device, and has for years over multiple major releases. Foods, drinks, many types of animals including specific breeds, OCRing all text on the image even when massively distorted, etc.
This feature is some new "landmark" detection and it feels like it's a trial balloon or something as it simply makes zero sense unless what they are categorizing as landmarks is enormous. The example is always the Eiffel tower, but the data to identify most of the world's major landmarks is small relative to what the device can already detect, not to mention that such lookups don't even need photo identification and could instead (and actually already do and long have) use simple location data and nearby POIs for such metadata tagging.
The landmarks thing is the beginning, but I feel like they want it to be much more detailed. Like every piece of art, model of car, etc, including as they change with new releases, etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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
> 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)
Dumb Photo App by Nefarious DataExfiltration Co & Son
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.