Comment by t43562
I never even knew images could be searched this way on a phone and the iPhone users in my family don't either.
A huge privacy-bruising feature for nothing in our case.
I never even knew images could be searched this way on a phone and the iPhone users in my family don't either.
A huge privacy-bruising feature for nothing in our case.
Do you mean the ability to search in Apple Photos is “privacy-bruising”, or are you referring to landmark identification?
If the latter, please note that this feature doesn’t actually send a query to a server for a specific landmark — your device does the actual identification work. It’s a rather clever feature in that sense…
I’ve been using it a lot recently. Multiple times even today while I’ve been trying to find just the right photos of my theater for a brochure I’m putting together. I have over 100,000 photos in Apple photos so even if I vaguely remember when I took a photo it’s still difficult to find it manually.
As a concrete example, someone on my team today asked me “can you send me that photo from the comedy festival a couple years ago that had the nice projections on the proscenium?”. I searched apple photos (on my phone, while hiking through a park) for “sketchfest theater projection”. It used the OCR to find Sketchfest and presumably the vector embeddings of theater and projection. The one photo she was referring to was the top result. It’s pretty impressive.
It can’t always find the exact photo I’m thinking of the first time, but I can generally find any vaguely-remembered photo from years ago without too much effort. It is pretty magical. You should get in the habit of trying it out, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised.