Hi guys! Is there any smart gallery app that can help tag/search the gallery pictures through automatically created tags, such as objects/things recognized in the pictures, locations etc? This is a rather convenient feature in some apple and samsung phones, which I think would be nice to have…But I reckon must consume some CPU/battery. I’d still want it scanning the gallery from time to time, if it was a private local process.
ente is an e2ee photo storage that has on-device ML. The AI is “ok.” It can generally find what I’m looking for with some false positives thrown in. Not as good as Google’s super computers, but it runs on device and is fully open-source, so I’m happy to use it.
But at the same time entered requires an email 😵
You can always use fastmail, firefox relay, or icloud to create a masked one.
If this thing does everything offline, why would it require me to register
Also, icloud? Icloud?? Why on earth would you say that? How? This an F-Droid thread, why icloud 🤣
My understanding is that apple/google do that server side because its difficult to do on the phone.
FOSS wise there are a few tools out there but they are self hosted (ex. Immich). Don’t know if any app-only version exists yet
Apple does it locally on the device.
Apparently Tidy does it. It’s…a bit resource heavy, and if the picture library is big, it seems to be taking quite a while to chew through it…We’ll see if performance improves after the first scan.
I wish these solutions would save their tags to the images themselves. Every gallery with automated or manual tagging seems to have its own way of storing the tags, making them relevant only for that app.
the closest I’ve (just) found is Tidy: https://github.com/slavabarkov/tidy
You could try https://f-droid.org/packages/com.slavabarkov.tidy/
Wow…This really does the job! It really went through my 2 years picture collection, which took about 40min (and a chunk of battery), but after that, any random search term was really nailed on the results shown! Seriously impressive. My concern is, when I opened it a second time, it still took a full couple of minutes to go through the whole picture set again, even though there were no changes to the library…Is there any problem, or the scan is always slow even when there’s no changes?
Thanks a lot, this is awesome!
Unfortunately I don’t use it, so I couldn’t tell you
Glad to have helped anyways
There is a self hosted option u can run on a server that uses ai embeds to tag things can do video and images I forget what its called tho and its not an app unfortunatly but with some tactful bodging should be doable.
Do you mean immich?
Yep that’s it and turns out it does have an app on froid app.
That app needs the server though.
Like others suggested, immich might be able to solve the use case - it just means you have to sync your photos to immich for the server to index the photos. Then in the app you can search for any recognized objects / locations / etc so from your phone it works about the same as Google photos search. Like I can search beach or cat or whatever from my phone and find all of those photos, and it’s private since it’s self hosted.
I run immich on my nas so it does both photo backup and provides a nice high performance searchable app / web UI to browse and organize photos into albums. It also does private face recognition and tags people, which are searchable too (the most recent app update actually just brought advanced search to the mobile app) so you can select john doe under the people filters and search fish and up comes only pictures of john showing off fish he caught.
Thanks! A question though…does that mean that the pictures need to be stored cloud-only? I’d like to keep the bulk of them on the phone on local storage. Or how does it work?
Thanks for the recommendation…I’m tempted to get my hands onto Immich.
It syncs your photos so typically your photos will be both backed up to your cloud and on your device. Photos in the app show an icon depending on whether it’s local only (hasn’t been backed up yet) or on both cloud and local, or cloud only (if you deleted the local copy). There will eventually be a feature that allows you to bulk delete all local copies of photos that are backed up (similar to Google photos app’s free up space feature) but for now photos will keep a local copy unless you select the specific photo and delete the local copy.
Since photos and videos are often local + cloud, that means if you open a photo in the immich gallery which has been cloud synced but still available locally, sharing to another app will use the local copy. Otherwise it will download the photo before sharing to the other app. So it’s pretty seamless in that way.
Local only ai is fun, but I’m using photoprism (and failing at moving to immich) because my photo library takes hundreds of GB compressed
