Opensolr Photos 1.11: Tag Many Photos at Once, and Find the True Copies

Opensolr Photos, the free and open-source Android app that makes the photos on your phone searchable by what they show, keeping the photos on your phone and their descriptions in an Opensolr Index of your own.

01 Tag many photos at once

The selection bar has a new action, Tag, and it is always available.

• With photos ticked it tags those; with nothing ticked it tags every photo the view is showing — a search, an album, a group of duplicates. Never anything else in your index.
• The same tag field and the same suggestions as editing a single photo: your own tags first, then the words your photos were read into.
• The tags each photo already has are kept, and what a photo shows is left alone — that belongs to each photo on its own.
• Saving closes the sheet and the writing carries on in the background, with its progress on screen, so hundreds of photos do not keep you waiting.

It is written in batches of fifty, so it costs one AI request per fifty photos on plans with vector search, rather than one per photo — and search by meaning knows the new tags straight away.

02 Duplicates: the true copies

The strictest way to group photos used to be by file size, and size is not identity: a camera writes its files in whole blocks, so hundreds of quite different photos end up with exactly the same number of bytes.

• The phone now works out the fingerprint of each photo file and keeps it in your index, so the last stop of the slider, Same file (exact copy), groups only files that are the same byte for byte.
• The fingerprint is worked out on the phone. Opensolr only ever receives a small re-encoded copy of a photo, which carries none of the original's identity.
• Photos already in your index take the fingerprint the next time they are indexed.

03 Getting around a large library

• Groups fold away. Every heading — Today, the months, Best matches, Also similar, a group of duplicates — folds with a tap and says how many photos it is hiding. What you folded is remembered for that view, as is the place you had reached in the list.
• Tagged photos are marked with a small tag in the corner, in every view, and a Tagged / Not tagged filter shows one or the other.
• The Folder filter is gone. Android names a folder by its whole path, so a library kept in nested folders filled the list with entries that all looked alike. Folders are still searched by words, a photo's details still name its folder, and choosing which folders are indexed is untouched.
• Deleting photos no longer moves you. The grid remembers which photo was at the top, not its number in the list, so a shorter list still lands where you were.