Find any photo on your phone by what is in it.
Opensolr Photos turns the pictures in your phone's folders into a search engine. Type “dog on the beach”, “birthday cake” or “snow in the mountains”, narrow it down by year, camera, city or country, see them on a map, and tap a result to open it in your gallery. The index behind it is your own Opensolr Index, not somebody else's cloud.
Free and open source under the MIT license. Android 8.0 or newer. Sign in with your Opensolr account — create one if you do not have it yet.
Your photos go in. Opensolr reads them. You search.
There is nothing to set up on the Opensolr side. The app creates this phone's index the first time you sign in, keeps it in step with the folders you choose, and never touches the photos themselves — they stay exactly where they are.
- Sign in with OpensolrThe Opensolr login opens in your phone's browser, with your saved password and two-factor authentication if you use it. The app never sees your password.
- See what your plan coversRight after sign-in the app shows, in plain numbers, how many photos a month your plan can read, how much disk space and search bandwidth your index has, and where to upgrade.
- Pick your foldersDCIM, where your camera saves, is proposed. Add screenshots, WhatsApp images or any other folder you like.
- Let the first sync runYour photos are read and indexed in the background, with a progress notification. New photos show up in search while the rest are still being added.
- SearchType what you remember, filter, and tap a photo to open it in Google Photos or your phone's own gallery app.
A search engine for your camera roll.
Not a gallery that wants to replace your gallery: Opensolr Photos is the part your gallery is missing. Find the photo, and it opens where you already look at photos.
Search by meaning, not by file name
Every photo is read into words describing what it shows. With a plan that includes vector search, “puppy” also finds the photos read as “dog”, and “seaside holiday” finds the beach.
Filter what you found
Narrow any search by year, folder, camera make and model, city, region, country, orientation, or a distance around a point — the filters come from your own photos, so every choice has results behind it.
See them on a map
Every photo taken with a location becomes a marker on a map, grouped the way you would expect. Tap a group to see its photos, or search the area you are looking at. The place is written into the index too, so “Lisbon” is a search, a filter and a suggestion.
Type less, find more
As you type, the app offers the words your own photos were read into, the cameras and the places. Misspell something and it asks Did you mean…? Nothing is guessed from a dictionary; every suggestion is a photo you have.
Opens in your gallery
Tap a result and it opens in Google Photos or your phone's own gallery, where you edit, share and delete as always. Press and hold for the details: date, camera, settings, place, and the words Opensolr saw.
Stays in step on its own
The app notices when your photos change: a minute after you take, edit or delete a picture, a sync runs by itself, even with the app closed. A weekly or monthly Re-Sync stands behind it, a Force Re-Sync button is one tap away, and you can pick any photos and have them read again.
One index per phone
Every phone gets its own Opensolr Index in your account. Reinstall the app and it finds its index again and only syncs the differences; set up a second phone and it gets an index of its own.
Never silently stuck
If your plan runs out of photos for the month, disk space or bandwidth, the app tells you with a notification and a link to upgrade. If the index disappears from your account, a new one is created and filled again automatically.
The originals never leave your phone.
To read a photo, the app sends a small copy of it to Opensolr, which describes it in words and throws the copy away. What is kept is a description, in an index that belongs to your account.
What the app does not do
On purpose, and you can check it in the source.
- No photo backup. The app is a search engine. Your photos are not copied anywhere.
- No ads, no analytics, no tracking. The app talks to Opensolr, and to OpenStreetMap for the map tiles while the map is open. Nothing else.
- No Google account. Sign-in is your Opensolr account, in your browser.
- No changes to your photos. The app only reads them.
How your account is protected
The same care as the rest of the platform.
- Browser sign-in, so your password, your password manager and two-factor authentication stay in the browser.
- Encrypted on the phone with a key held by Android's secure key store, and never included in phone backups.
- Encrypted in transit. Every connection is HTTPS; plain HTTP is switched off for the whole app.
- Sign out at any time from the app; your index stays in your account.
An Opensolr account. A plan with vector search for the full experience.
The app shows all of this right after you sign in, with your real numbers, and keeps showing it on its Opensolr account screen. Here is what each part of your plan means for your photos.
Vector search
Search by meaning. Without it photos are still read into words and searchable by those words.
AI requests per month
Each new photo uses two: one to read it into words, one to turn the words into a search fingerprint (one on plans without vector search). Photos already indexed never cost anything again, not even after a reinstall.
Disk space
How many photo descriptions the index can hold. Only the descriptions are stored, never the pictures.
Search bandwidth
How much searching and syncing the index can serve in a month.
Indexes
One per phone you use the app on.
Every line is on GitHub.
Opensolr Photos is MIT licensed. Read how sign-in works, how the index is built and exactly what is sent where, build the APK yourself, or fork it and make it yours. The documentation in the repository explains all of it, with diagrams.
Source code
Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, no closed-source SDKs. github.com/phpcip/opensolr-photos
Documentation
How it works, sign-in, sync, search, the map, the index schema, privacy, a developer tour of the project, and building from source. Read the documentation
Releases
Every version with its signed APK and release notes. All releases
Four steps, about a minute.
- Download the APK on your phoneopensolr-photos.apk, the latest signed release from GitHub.
- Allow the installAndroid asks once whether your browser may install apps. Allow it for this install.
- Open Opensolr Photos and sign inWith your Opensolr account. No account yet? Create one.
- Pick your foldersThe first sync starts on its own. Search as soon as the first photos arrive.
Search your photos the way you remember them
Free, open source, and backed by an index that belongs to you. Need more photos a month, disk space or bandwidth? See the plans.