Opensolr Photos 1.12: Find the Receipt by What Is Printed on It

Everyone photographs paperwork. Petrol receipts for the expense claim, an invoice to send on later, the label of a paint you want to buy again, a screenshot of an address. Those photos were the hardest ones to find again, because what makes them worth keeping is printed inside them. From 1.12, Opensolr Photos reads that text and you search it like anything else.

01 What changes for you

• Type petrom, or the total, or the receipt number, and the receipt comes up.
• Type the name of a company and the invoice you photographed comes up.
• Type a product code off a shelf label, or a few words from a screenshot, and you get the photo.
• Nothing to turn on, nothing new to type: the words go into the same place your searches already read.

02 What it costs

Nothing on top of indexing the photo. A photo counts a tenth of an AI request, and that tenth covers the words it was read into, its search vector and the text printed on it. A photo that has been read once is never read again.

Only photos that carry text are read at all. Opensolr looks at the photo first, and unless what it sees is document-like — a label, a receipt, an invoice, a card, a menu, a poster, a screenshot — the photo is never sent for reading. A holiday album costs you nothing.

03 Installing it

The update brings a new index configuration, so the app asks once to reset and re-sync the index: your photos are read again, and the text of the ones you already had is read with them. Your own tags and words are kept. Search keeps working while it runs.

Opensolr Photos is free and open source, and the index stays in your own Opensolr account.