1. Your photos were going to Google — here they never go to Opensolr or anyone else: they stay in your folders, and are backed up only to storage you own, if you want a backup. No Google account, no ads, no analytics. 2. Twenty thousand photos and no way to find one — type what you remember. 3. The receipt your accountant asks for — found by the shop, the total or the number printed on it, and shared from the app. 4. Your metadata is yours — people, places, tags and your wording are kept in an Opensolr Index on your own account, plain Apache Solr you can query, export and take anywhere, not in someone else's private database. 5. The same picture thirty times — one slider from “the same thing” to “the same file, byte for byte”. 6. Nothing to take on trust — every line is on GitHub under MIT, and it runs on a free Opensolr account that does not expire.
Opensolr Photos answers one question well: where is that photo? You type what you remember — dog on the beach, birthday cake, the name of a friend, the total on a receipt — and the app shows the photos on your phone that match.
- Search by words and meaning, with operators and suggestions.
- Receipts and screenshots found by the text printed in them.
- People named once and found everywhere, compared on the phone.
- Browsing by date and filters made of your own photos.
- A full-screen viewer that swipes through your results, a small editor, your own tags and wording and places.
- Similar photos, from the same people to the same file.
- A map, Stats and a document scanner with PDF.
- Videos and PDFs, page by page, next to your photos.
- A sync that keeps itself in step, on an index that is yours, and one library on several phones.
- Backup to your own S3 bucket or WebDAV folder, and your library back on a new phone.
- The same library in your browser.
- It never keeps your files at Opensolr. The index holds descriptions of them, never the pictures. The backup is optional and goes only to an S3 bucket or WebDAV folder of your own.
- It does not change your pictures on its own. Your tags, names and wording are kept on the phone and in your index, never written into the files. A photo file changes only when you edit it and choose Overwrite the original, and it is deleted only when you ask, after a warning.
- It does not track you. No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no third-party SDK that talks to the network. Besides Opensolr, the app talks only to OpenStreetMap, for the map tiles while the map is open, to GitHub, once a day, to ask whether a newer version exists, and to download it when you tap to install it, and to your own storage when you set a backup.
- It does not need a Google account. Sign-in is your Opensolr account, in your browser.
- It reads printed text, not barcodes. On a plan with vector search the text printed in a photo is read and searchable; barcodes and QR codes are not decoded.
Anyone with more photos on their phone than they can scroll through, who would rather search them than hand them to a cloud photo service. And developers who want to see a complete, working example of an Android app built on an Opensolr Index: sign-in, provisioning, bulk indexing with vectors, hybrid search — all of it open source.
How it works explains the app, Opensolr and your index in one page, and the project structure takes a developer through the code.
Start here
- Documentation home
- What Opensolr Photos is
- Requirements
- Installing the app
- Updating the app
- The web app