Opensolr Photos 2.4: Tags in Your Photos, People Everywhere, Search You Can Tune

Since 2.0 gave Opensolr Photos a viewer of its own, versions 2.1 to 2.4 went after what a large, well-kept library needs: your own words written into your photos, the people in them, and fewer things in the way.

01 Your tags and words, saved into your photos

When you save tags, they are written into the photo file itself, on your phone, not only into your index. Every photo app that reads keywords (Lightroom, digiKam, Windows) sees them. Your own wording of what the photo shows and the names of the people go into the file too, so after a reinstall or a reset of your index Opensolr Photos reads all of it back from the photos, and nothing you wrote is lost.

Keywords written by other apps are never pulled into your index on their own. When you edit a photo they are shown in the tag field, so you can keep or remove them; they count only if you save.

02 People, everywhere

• Name the people in a photo in Edit, or on many photos at once from the selection bar. The names are saved into the photo file and into your index, and the names you already used are suggested as you type.
• A People filter lists everyone by name, with the number of their photos.
• People albums come first in Albums, one per person.
• The same name written two ways — Luminița Laura and luminita laura — is kept once, and the same goes for tags.

No face recognition happens here. The names are the ones you type, or the ones already written on the file.

03 Albums you can act on

• Sections come in the order people reach for: People, My tags, Years, Places, then the rest. Each folds away, and one button folds or opens them all.
• Press and hold a section or an album to select it, or check them all at once. Delete removes every photo in what you selected, after a warning that says exactly what goes. Share hands every photo of one album to the app you choose.

04 Search that you can tune

• A Semantic ↔ Lexical Balance slider on the Me screen decides how much meaning and how much your words count when you search with AI on.
• Matching words only, your tags weigh most, then the names of the people, then the text printed in the photo, then what it shows. A photo's search vector is made of the people, your tags, what it shows and where it was taken, in that order.
• Photo descriptions no longer fill up with obscure proper names and rare foreign words — a dish, a folk sport, a local dog breed — while the everyday words stay. Photos already indexed get the cleaner words when they are read again.
• Check all above the results ticks a whole result set, so a search, an album or a group of look-alikes can be tagged in one go.
• Clearer filters: OCR, Tagged, Has people and Has location are simple switches, with Meaning right under OCR, so switching OCR on and picking receipt finds your paperwork.

05 Less in the way

• Every action of a photo sits under it in the full screen view: tag, gallery, similar, share, map, nearby, delete.
• The photos screen carries no messages about your plan; they are on the Me screen, with the reasons.
• Suggestions close when you tap anywhere else, in every field.
• Re-read on the Sync screen sends every photo through Opensolr again to pick up what it does better now, without emptying your index: search keeps working, your tags, people and wording are kept, and it carries on where it stopped.
• A photo your phone cannot open is listed under a red button instead of being tried again at every sync, and a sync never goes round in circles.
• The count is short (1.2K), the buttons above the grid never move, group headings are small and quiet, and double tap zooms smoothly.

Opensolr Photos is free and open source, and the index stays in your own Opensolr account. No index reset is needed for this update.