Opensolr Photos 2.0: Your Photos, in Your Own App

Since 1.12 learned to read the text printed in your photos, the app has been rebuilt around the thing it was missing: somewhere of its own to look at a photo. That, and everything that came with it, is 2.0.

01 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 Opensolr Photos, at its own size, and a swipe left or right walks your results in their own order, fetching the next page as it goes.

• Pinch to magnify, as far in as the picture goes — there is no ceiling. Double tap magnifies on the point you touched, and again brings it back.
• While a photo is magnified, one finger moves it about. Zooming out stops at the whole picture and never closes the view.
• Swipe up for the photo's details, which open over it. Swipe down to put it back where you were: it follows your finger and springs back if you let go too soon.
• Tag, Gallery, Share and Delete under the picture. Your gallery has not gone anywhere; it is simply no longer the only way to look at a photo.

The details are laid out the way a camera shows a frame: the picture small, and beside it the file, the folder, when it was taken, on what, its size and resolution, the aperture, exposure and ISO. Below that only what Opensolr knows — your tags, the people on it, what it shows, and the text printed in it.

02 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, and they travel with the photo. 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.

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

Every month now breaks into its days, each with its own heading you can fold away — and it stays folded — or tick to take that whole day at once. Down the right edge there is a bar: drag it and you cross months in one movement, with the month and the day shown in a badge lifted clear of your thumb.

04 Any two days, and three new filters

The filters gained a calendar: pick a start day and an end day, both included, instead of a whole year. The list of years stays above it, because it tells you which years actually hold photos.

• 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.

05 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, so a station name or a receipt number brings up the photo that carries it. A Rebuild OCR documents button on the Sync screen reads your documents again with the reading tidied up, and costs nothing on your plan.

Next to the results there is now an AI switch. On, the search blends meaning with words. Off, it matches words only — which is what you want for an exact code or an invoice number, where meaning only drags the answer away from the thing you asked for.

06 Stopping a sync

A first sync of a large library runs for hours, and while it ran nothing else could be asked for. There is a Stop button now: everything already indexed stays indexed, and the next sync carries on from there on its own.

07 A tap you can feel

The app answers your hands: when you start picking photos, when the scroll bar crosses a month or a day, when a filter goes on (firmer) or off (lighter), when you press Done, when the next page arrives. One switch in Me turns all of it off, and it obeys your phone's own haptics setting besides.

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.

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