Filters & photo details

Tap the filters button on the search line to narrow any search. Every tap applies at once and the results and the counts follow along. Small Clear all and Done (N) buttons, where N is the number of photos shown with the current filters, sit both at the top and at the bottom of the sheet. Active filters show as removable pills on one horizontally scrolling row.

Every filter sits under a heading drawn exactly like a month on the grid, and folds away with the same tap. In the sheet they come in this order: Year and Taken between; then Photo has, which holds the switches OCR, Tagged, Has people and Has location; then Meaning; then the lists People, My tags (Albums), City and Country; then everything else, and Distance last when a radius is set. A switch that is off shows every photo.

All the groups start folded, and each one comes back the way you left it on the next visit. A folded heading carries a badge with how many of its own filters are on, so nothing applied can hide under it.

The values offered always have a count next to them, so every choice has photos behind it. While you are only browsing, they are the lists of the whole library, asked for in one request the first time the sheet is needed and then kept on the phone until a sync actually writes something, because nothing else can change them — opening and closing the sheet again costs nothing. From the first filter or the first word typed on, the values and their counts are the facets of the results themselves. Several values of one section can be chosen together (2025 and 2026), which is an OR within the section and an AND across sections; the section you are choosing in keeps offering all its values (its own filter is excluded from its facet). Long lists show the twelve most frequent values first, with Show all. The city, region and country of a photo come from its GPS position, turned into words at indexing time (see sync).

When a radius filter is active, the filter sheet shows a Distance section with 0.5, 1, 5, 25 and 100 km, plus Anywhere to drop it.

Tap a photo and it fills the screen at its own size — the original, not the small copy the grid is drawn from.

• Swipe left and right to walk the photos you searched for, in the order they came back. This is the reason the viewer exists: your gallery knows nothing about your search, so swiping there walks the camera roll instead. As you near the end of what has been loaded, the next page is asked for on its own, so the swipe runs as far as the results do.
• Tap the picture for every action of the photo, as a row of icons under it: Tag (tags, people and words), Gallery, Similar, Share, Map and Nearby (only when the photo has a position) and Delete. Tap again to hide them.
• Swipe up for the photo's details. They carry no buttons: every action lives in the row under the photo.
• Swipe down to go back to the results, standing exactly where you left them. The photo follows your finger and springs back if you let go too soon.
• Pinch to magnify around your fingers, 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.
• Tag opens the tags over the photo; closing them puts the photo’s details back.

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

Gallery opens the photo in Google Photos or the phone's own gallery, with read access granted for that one photo, for editing as always.

• If Android re-numbered the photo since it was indexed, the app finds it again by its path and opens it anyway.
• If the photo is no longer on the phone, the app says so; the next Re-Sync removes it from the index.

Swipe up on a photo in the full screen view to open its details:

The actions of the photo are not here but in the row under the photo itself: Similar shows photos like this one (see duplicates), Map opens the map on that spot and Nearby searches within 5 km of it. Tapping one of your tags in the details opens the editor.

Tag under the photo opens the editor, at full height:

• My tags (Albums): one tag per entry, added with Add or the keyboard's Done key (commas split into several), removed with a tap. Names, places, events, anything you would search for. Your tags weigh more than any word Opensolr saw.
• Tag suggestions: the tag field lists suggestions under it when focused. With nothing typed, the 5 most used of your tags and the 5 most used of the model's words; while typing (after a 250 ms pause), up to 8 tags and 5 words that contain the text anywhere, in any case. Tags already on the photo are not offered. They are all counted on the phone, out of its own copy of the index, so nothing is fetched while you type; a thin accent line shows while they are being worked out. Tapping outside the field and its list closes the list; tapping the field again reopens it.
• People: the names of the people in the photo. A name is put on a photo only by naming a face (tap Faces in the viewer); here it can only be taken off. The change is saved on the phone at once, and the sync that follows carries it up to your index.
• Tags already in the file, written by Lightroom, digiKam or Windows, are shown in the tag field when the editor opens, so you can keep or remove them. They reach your index only if you save.
• What the photo shows: the words Opensolr read the photo into, as text you can change freely. Reset clears your wording; when you save, the photo is read again and Opensolr's own description comes back.
• Save finishes on the phone: the edit is written there and the photo is searchable by it straight away. A sync starts right after and carries the words up, 50 photos to a call and no pictures attached, because only the words changed (the photos_words endpoint). On plans with vector search the photo's vector is computed again (one AI request), made of the people, your tags, what the photo shows and where it was taken, in that order.

Your tags, names and wording (up to 2,000 characters, and only when you changed it) are kept on the phone and in your own Opensolr Index; the app never writes them into the photo files. On a new phone or after a reinstall they are read back from your index. Keywords other apps wrote into a file are only offered in the editor, and reach your index only if you save them. The same tag or name written two ways — Luminița Laura and luminita laura — is kept once, on the phone and on Opensolr.

Tag in the selection bar tags every ticked photo at once. The sheet has My tags (Albums), with an Add / Replace switch, and a place for photos with a wrong position or none; people are not typed here. Add puts what you typed on top of what each photo already carries; Replace makes it the whole of that field on every ticked photo, removing what they have now, and the sheet says so under the switch. Under the form, what the ticked photos already carry is listed, with how many of them carry each name and each tag, worked out on the phone. Saving finishes on the phone here too, and the sync that starts right after carries the words up to your index. The photo files are never changed.

Press and hold a photo to start selecting: that photo is ticked and the bar appears at the bottom, and from then on a tap ticks and unticks. There is no Select button and no Check all. Selection ends by itself when the last tick goes.

A tick on a group heading takes the whole group — a year, a month or a day — not only the photos already loaded on screen. In a text search, Best matches and Also similar carry no group tick: the line between them moves as more results arrive.

• Share hands the ticked photos to any app that takes pictures.
• Delete removes them from the phone and from your index, after the app's own warning and, on Android 11 and newer, the system confirmation. See searching.
• Re-sync N has them read again by Opensolr at a sync that starts right away, whatever the index already holds about them. Each one counts as new AI requests. Photos edited in place are noticed on their own, see sync; this is for when you want a photo read again anyway.

The duplicates view can tick one photo of every group of alike photos for you.