I really want an app that locally indexes my locally stored photos and lets me search them locally, based on places, things or people seen in the photo.
For example here’s me searching for “forest”. But it also supports looking for people (even multiple people in the same image), places, dates, or combinations of all of them. It’ll also look for text in images. The link has more examples
All hosted and processed on my local computer, and connected to the mobile app
That is completely fair, and part of that is on me since I spend so much time in self hosting communities where such a recommendation isn’t too out of the ordinary, while it’s way out of scope for what most people are looking for
Having a more user friendly and approachable way to do stuff like this would be very helpful
I’m sorry, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. All my photos are on my local hard drive on my computer at home, and I just point immich at that folder.
Once it boots up, immich doesn’t need internet to function, except for the first time you use image processing (the machine learning to search for things inside of images) and geocoding (putting the images on a map). Once it downloads those for the first time immich can run completely offline on your local computer. If you wish, you can open immich so you can connect to it from another device, such as a phone, but your images/data never leaves your device
I want an app that runs locally on my phone in my pocket and indexes the photos I’ve stored locally there, without ever needing any kind of network connection.
But the way you’re describing your setup, it seems to me as if copying your photos to your computer in order to get them indexed is a necessary step.
That’s fair. And in the case of Immich, the photos are automatically backed up to my computer so if I lose my phone I don’t lose the images, but I totally understand wanting something exclusively on the phone (Immich can let you browse photos local on your phone, but I don’t think it indexes them for searching by person/object). Unfortunately I’m not sure something like that exists, especially since the machine learning for identifying people/objects in pictures is pretty computationally intensive.
I wish you luck in your search! I agree that would be a great app to have
I really want an app that locally indexes my locally stored photos and lets me search them locally, based on places, things or people seen in the photo.
Immich lets you do this
https://immich.app/docs/features/searching/
For example here’s me searching for “forest”. But it also supports looking for people (even multiple people in the same image), places, dates, or combinations of all of them. It’ll also look for text in images. The link has more examples
All hosted and processed on my local computer, and connected to the mobile app
I think there is a fine line between “installing an app” and “spinning up a docker image and keeping it maintained”.
I’m in the camp that Docker images are what .exe’s used to be, but they’re not easily accessible still. So Immich doesn’t count I fear.
That is completely fair, and part of that is on me since I spend so much time in self hosting communities where such a recommendation isn’t too out of the ordinary, while it’s way out of scope for what most people are looking for
Having a more user friendly and approachable way to do stuff like this would be very helpful
The way you write this makes it seem as if the app doesn’t actually locally index locally stored photos. Is that so?
I’m sorry, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. All my photos are on my local hard drive on my computer at home, and I just point immich at that folder.
Once it boots up, immich doesn’t need internet to function, except for the first time you use image processing (the machine learning to search for things inside of images) and geocoding (putting the images on a map). Once it downloads those for the first time immich can run completely offline on your local computer. If you wish, you can open immich so you can connect to it from another device, such as a phone, but your images/data never leaves your device
I want an app that runs locally on my phone in my pocket and indexes the photos I’ve stored locally there, without ever needing any kind of network connection.
But the way you’re describing your setup, it seems to me as if copying your photos to your computer in order to get them indexed is a necessary step.
That’s fair. And in the case of Immich, the photos are automatically backed up to my computer so if I lose my phone I don’t lose the images, but I totally understand wanting something exclusively on the phone (Immich can let you browse photos local on your phone, but I don’t think it indexes them for searching by person/object). Unfortunately I’m not sure something like that exists, especially since the machine learning for identifying people/objects in pictures is pretty computationally intensive.
I wish you luck in your search! I agree that would be a great app to have
Well, that’s exactly why such an app was what I wrote as my reply to the question “What app/program do you wish existed […]?”
I second Immich. Does this great, and the local AI mapping is pretty good.
Digikam
No search by “thing” without manually tagging though
While this seems very interesting, it doesn’t seem to exist as an app, the download page only lists downloads for desktop operating systems:
https://www.digikam.org/download/
Do they also provide an app somewhere where I haven’t looked yet?
Ah, apologies, I use the word “app” much more liberally.
No, I don’t believe there would be a mobile release for Digikam and I’m not aware of similar software for mobile operating systems.