Comment by TeMPOraL

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.