Opensolr Photos 1.19: People, Dates, Documents, and a Viewer of Your Own

Since 1.12 learned to read the text printed in your photos, a run of releases has gone out in quick succession. Rather than list them one by one, here is everything that changed, in one place.

01 Photos are found by who is in them

If something has already put names to the faces in your library — Google Photos, Lightroom, digiKam, Apple Photos — it writes those names onto the files themselves, in a standard metadata field, and they travel with the photo from then on. Opensolr Photos reads them and indexes them: type a name and you get that person's photos. Names written with diacritics are found either way.

No face recognition happens here. No face is measured, compared or stored, on your phone or on Opensolr. A name is read the way a file name is read, and a photo that carries none is indexed exactly as before.

02 A day at a time, and a year under your thumb

A month of holiday photos used to arrive as one unbroken run of hundreds of thumbnails. Now every month is broken into its days, each with its own heading you can fold away, or tick to take that whole day at once. Headings are larger, which also makes them easier to hit.

Down the right edge of your photos there is a bar. Drag it and you cross months in one movement, with the month you are passing shown in a badge lifted clear of your thumb. It answers back as it goes: a firmer tap for every month you cross, a lighter one for every day, so after a moment you go by feel rather than by watching. It fades away when you stop.

03 Any two days, not a whole year

The filters gained a calendar. Pick a start day and an end day and both are included — “that week in July” is one filter instead of a year to scroll through. The list of years stays above it, because it tells you which years actually hold photos, and how many; an empty calendar tells you nothing.

04 The words printed in a photo now carry their weight

Reading the text in your photos arrived in 1.12; using it well did not. Those words now sit just under what the photo shows, above everything else. Type a station name, a receipt number or a product code off a shelf label and the photo that carries it comes first, instead of every photo that merely looks like a document.

A Rebuild OCR documents button on the Sync screen reads your documents again, with the reading tidied up: line breaks joined into sentences, and scraps too short to mean anything dropped rather than stored. It costs nothing on your plan — what was read from a photo is kept against the picture itself, so a photo read once is never read again.

05 An AI switch, and three filters

Next to the count above your photos, once something is typed, there is now a switch. On, the search blends meaning with words. Off, it matches words only — which is what you want for an exact code, an invoice number or a reference, where meaning only drags the answer away from the thing you asked for.

• Printed text — photos with words read out of them, or those without.
• People — photos with people named on them, or those without.
• Documents — the paperwork: receipts, invoices, certificates, labels, tickets, screenshots. Not the same as having printed text: a document photographed badly is still a document, and it is judged the same way Opensolr decides a photo is worth reading at all.

06 Stopping a sync

A first sync of a large library runs for hours, and while it ran nothing else could be asked for — not a forced sync, not a reset. There is a Stop button now. Everything already indexed stays indexed, and the next sync carries on from there. It is a stop, not a switch-off: your schedule and the watch on your folders are left standing, so the next sync starts on its own exactly as it would have.

The four actions on that screen — Re-Sync, Stop, Documents, Reset — are now one row of icons with short labels, the way the bar at the top of your photos reads.

07 A viewer that knows what you searched for

You search for something, you find the six photos that match, you tap one to look at it properly — and then you swipe, and you are somewhere else entirely, in the middle of your camera roll. Your gallery opens the photo happily enough, but it knows nothing about the search you just ran, so the photos either side of it are the wrong ones.

A tap now opens the photo full screen inside the app, at its own size, and a swipe left or right walks your results in their own order. Swipe far enough and the next page is fetched on its own, so it runs as far as the search does.

• Tap the picture for the actions under it: Edit, Gallery, Share, Delete.
• Swipe up for the photo's details — date, camera, settings, place, the words it was read into, its tags.
• Swipe down to go back to the results, standing exactly where you left them.

Your gallery has not gone anywhere. Gallery opens the photo there, for editing as always. It is simply no longer the only way to look at a photo.

08 Installing it

The names of people need a new index configuration, so the app asks once to reset and re-sync: your photos are read again and the names are written in with them. It costs you nothing — a photo read once is never read again — and your tags are kept. Everything else here installs over what you have with nothing to reset.

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