How it works

Three moving parts: the app on your phone, the Opensolr platform, and the phone's own Opensolr Index. The app talks to each of them over HTTPS and to nothing else.

• Finds photos through Android's MediaStore, in the folders you chose.
• Reads each photo's camera details itself: date, camera, lens, exposure, place.
• Makes a small upright JPEG copy, 640 px on its long edge, for the reader. The copy is re-encoded from pixels and carries no metadata.
• Writes the documents into the index, and searches the index directly.
• Runs sync in the background, one at a time, and keeps a cache of what it already learned.
• Watches the photo library and syncs on its own when photos are added, changed or deleted.

A regular Opensolr Index named photos_<ANDROID_ID>__dense, created in your account on a server that runs vector search, with the app's own schema. The app reads and writes it directly with its credentials: /select to search and list, /update to add and delete. See the phone's index.

1. You take a photo; the camera saves it in DCIM/Camera/.
2. At the next sync the app finds it, gives it its id and sees it is not in the index.
3. The app reads its date, camera and GPS position, and makes the 640 px copy.
4. image_clip answers twelve words, for example dog, beach, sand, sea, ….
5. nearby_places turns the position into Constanţa, Constanţa, Romania.
6. batch_embed turns those words into a 1024-number vector.
7. The document — words, vector, date, camera, place, path — is written to the index, and the photo appears in search.
8. You edit the photo in your gallery; a minute later a sync notices the changed file and reads it again.
9. You delete the photo from your gallery; a minute later its id is missing from the phone, and its document is deleted from the index.