Phones you no longer use

Every phone works on an index in your Opensolr account, its own or one it shares with your other phones. When a phone is reset, replaced or loses the app, its index stays behind. This page says what happens then, and what to do.

Opensolr Photos creates one index per phone, named after an identifier Android gives the app on that phone. Reinstalling or updating the app keeps the identifier, so the phone finds its photos again. A factory reset or a new phone gets a new identifier: to the app that is a new device, and the old phone's photos stay in your account, untouched, until you decide.

Android gives an app no warning before a reset or an uninstall, so the app cannot clean up after itself. Two things cover that instead.

When you sign in on a phone that has no index of its own in your account yet, and your account already holds Opensolr Photos indexes, the app lists them by phone name — Samsung SM-S918B Galaxy S23 Ultra, Xiaomi 25102PCBEG — with when each was last synced, and asks whether to re-use one.

• Pick the phone this one used to be (the same phone after a reset, or its replacement with the same photos copied over) and the app carries on with those photos: no photo is read again, nothing new is created in your account, and your tags, people and words come back from that index, read once into the new phone's copy. A photo's id is its path inside the phone's storage, so the same folders on the new phone keep every photo's identity.
• No, start a new index starts fresh, with an index of its own.

The question is only asked in that one situation: a phone without an index of its own and an account that has some. Never on a reinstall, never on an update. A phone that already has photos can pick an index too: its photos are added to that library, and nothing on either side is lost. See one library on several phones.

Opensolr checks every Opensolr Photos index. One that no phone has synced with for 30 days (no request, no photo written) is considered left behind, and its owner gets one email, once per phone, saying which phone it was and how many photos it holds. Under section 9.2 of the Terms, an index that stays unused may be removed; the check itself removes nothing.

• The app never deletes an index. Not on sign-out, not on reinstall, not on update.
• The photos themselves were never in the index, only their words, tags and details. Deleting an index deletes nothing on any phone.