Opensolr Photos 2.5: Instant Tagging, Year by Year, and a Fraction of the Data

Opensolr Photos 2.5 is about what happens when your phone knows as much as your index does. It keeps its own copy of every document in it, so the two most common things you do - browsing your library and syncing it - no longer ask Opensolr anything.

01 Tagging is instant

Tags, names and your own wording are saved on your phone the moment you press Save, and the sync that starts right after carries them to your index. Nothing waits for the network, and an edit made with no signal is not lost - it simply travels later.

When the words change and the picture does not, only the words are sent: fifty photos per call, with no pictures attached at all.

• People first in the tagging form, then your tags, each with its own Add or Replace switch. Add puts what you typed on top of what every photo already carries; Replace makes it the whole of that field, and says so before you save.
• What the photos already carry is listed under the form, with how many of them carry each word.
• A long press starts selecting, and selecting ends by itself when the last tick goes. A tick on a heading takes the whole group - a year, a month, a day - not only what is on screen.

02 Your library, year by year

Photos are grouped by year, then by month, then by day. Every group is there from the first moment, with the number of photos it holds, whether or not it has been scrolled to. Open one and its photos arrive; fold it and it stays folded the next time you come back.

Today, Yesterday and the last few days stay where they were, above the years.

03 A fraction of the data

Your phone keeps a copy of everything your index holds about your photos - dates, camera, place, the words they were read into, the text printed in them, the people, your tags - everything except the search vector. It is read once, when you install the app, and kept in step by every write after that.

04 Filters that stay where you put them

• Every group of filters has the same heading as the groups on your photos, folds away, and comes back exactly as you left it. A folded heading carries a badge with how many of its own filters are on.
• Choosing years narrows the Taken between calendar to those years and opens it there; choosing days puts the years aside.
• Camera make is gone - the model already reads as the whole name.

05 The map

• Tapping a group of photos opens them straight away instead of zooming in a step at a time.
• The sheet of photos can be dragged up to the whole screen, and it says where here is - the city and the country.
• At night the map is dimmed rather than turned inside out, so the sea is blue again.

06 Fixes worth naming

• A photo with no date of its own no longer jumps to today when you tag it: your index keeps the date it already had.
• The text read out of a photo, and the words it was read into, are kept when a later pass cannot read it - a plan without photo recognition, or a monthly allowance used up - as long as it is the same file.
• Pulling the grid down reloads it and starts a sync.

07 2.5.2: faster, and fewer AI requests

• Big libraries are faster. Scrolling through tens of thousands of photos, the year and month headings, opening groups, tagging thousands of photos at once and the sync that compares your folders all do far less work on your phone.
• One vector per search. A typed search asks for its AI vector once and reuses it for 30 minutes, so the pages under it and the groups you open no longer each use an AI request.
• Filters in alphabetical order, so a long list of names, places or cameras is easy to look through.
• Fixed: a tag you had just saved could vanish from the grid until the sync ran, the refresh spinner could stay stuck, and a large selection froze the screen while it was being tagged, shared or deleted.