Opensolr Photos 1.13: Find a Photo by Who Is in It

Most photo libraries have been through something that recognises faces — a phone gallery, a desktop photo manager, an export from a cloud service. When it does, it writes the names onto the files themselves, in a standard metadata field, and they travel with the photo from then on. From 1.13, Opensolr Photos reads those names and indexes them, so a person is one word away.

01 What changes for you

• Type a name and you get the photos that person is in.
• A name written with diacritics is found without them, and the other way round.
• The names sit next to your own tags and what the photo shows, so you can combine them with everything else: a name, a place and a year in one search.
• Nothing to turn on. A photo that carries no names is indexed exactly as before.

02 No face recognition, here or anywhere

Opensolr Photos does not look at faces. It does not measure, compare or store them, on your phone or on Opensolr. It reads a name the way it reads a file name: as a fact already written on the file, in the standard PersonInImage field. If nothing has ever named the people on your photos, this feature has nothing to read and changes nothing for you.

The names are read on the phone, from the original file, and go to your own index and nowhere else. The copy that is uploaded for indexing is still a 640 px re-encoded picture, and it is still not kept.

03 Exact copies, now actually exact

The strictest stop of the duplicates slider, Same file (exact copy), was meant to group only true copies, byte for byte. It never had the data to do it. It does now, so that stop tells you what the one before it cannot: same file size groups photos that merely happen to be the same length, because cameras pad their files to whole blocks.

04 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 names are written in with them. Your own tags and words are kept, and search keeps working while it runs.

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