What Opensolr Photos is

What the app does, what it deliberately does not do, and who it is for.

Opensolr Photos answers one question well: where is that photo? You type what you remember — dog on the beach, birthday cake, snow in the mountains — and the app shows the photos on your phone that match, ready to open in the gallery you already use.

Search by meaning

Every photo is read into words describing what it shows. On a plan with vector search your words are matched on meaning too, so puppy finds the photos read as dog.

Filters from your own photos

Year, folder, camera make and model, city, region, country, orientation, a radius around a point, and photos that carry a location. Every choice offered has photos behind it.

Autocomplete and spelling

As you type, the words your photos were read into, the cameras and the places are offered; a misspelt search gets a Did you mean.

Your photos on a map

Every photo with a GPS position, grouped into markers on an OpenStreetMap map. Tap a group to see its photos, or search the area you are looking at.

Opens where you look at photos

Tap a result and it opens in Google Photos or your phone's gallery app. Press and hold for the details and the words Opensolr saw.

Keeps itself in step

A sync runs on its own a minute after your photos change, plus a weekly or monthly Re-Sync as a safety net, or a Force Re-Sync whenever you like. New photos are added, edited photos are read again, deleted photos leave the index.

An index that is yours

One Opensolr Index per phone, in your own account. You can open it in the control panel, back it up or empty it.

Plan limits in plain numbers

Right after sign-in, and on the account screen: photos per month, disk space, search bandwidth, and where to upgrade.

01 · What it deliberately does not do
  • It is not a backup. Your photos are not copied anywhere. The index holds descriptions of them, never the pictures.
  • It is not a gallery replacement. Editing, sharing and deleting stay in the gallery app you already use; the app only finds.
  • It does not change your photos. It only reads them.
  • It does not track you. No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no third-party SDK that talks to the network. The app talks to Opensolr, and to OpenStreetMap only for the tiles of the map screen when you open it.
  • It does not need a Google account. Sign-in is your Opensolr account, in your browser.
  • It does not read text or barcodes in photos. Photos are described by what they show; a receipt is found as a receipt, not by the numbers printed on it.
02 · Who it is for

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 the pieces fit together

How it works explains the app, Opensolr and your index in one page, and the project structure takes a developer through the code.

Opensolr Photos is open source and MIT licensed. Questions about your Opensolr account, index or plan go to opensolr.com/contact; questions about the app itself belong on GitHub.

Opensolr Photos Documentation