Show HN: Memos – Search engine for your screenshots and photos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Memos – Search engine for your screenshots and photos

memos.org

112 pointsgsundeep47 comments

Apps like this are an interesting outgrowth of Apple's recent-ish API improvements. It's (fairly) easy on iOS to do bulk on-device OCR now, because the Vision framework[1] natively supports it in a fancy hardware-accelerated manner.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/detecting_o...

Love your Privacy Policy:

→ Memos does not transmit any images or associated metadata.

→ All processing is done on your device

I don't want to be an ass but: We've been told that too many times.

If it's not open source I won't trust my private images to an app.

Great idea though!

Just turn off wifi/data while using the app (not sure, but I think you can also tweak this in your phone's settings for the app to not give permission to get data without being opened...)

I do not agree with the comment above about the open source part (that is just plain old FUD), but disabling internet access wouldn't protect against transmitting metadata unless you never turned it on again - it could simply store the metadata locally and wait until it found internet.

I think the point the above is making is that you can turn off internet/tcp/http access at the application level, say like we do with Notifications.

Surely this could be a welcomed thing.

iPhones sold in China allow you to do this. When an app is run for the first time, you’re asked if you permit it to access the Internet.

How are you gonna ensure the binary uploaded to the app store has the exact same code that is on the public repo?

OSS is not the solution.

The only solution is that your OS protects you, giving you tools to see what apps are doing what, and allowing you to finely adjust permissions and access.

You could completely trust this app if you could ban it from accessing the internet.

I understand your point, but to add to the discussion:

With android, you can use the F-Droid app store, which have "source builds". Source builds are apps built (and signed) by F-Droid, so you only need to trust the F-Droid team instead of each OSS app developer (and you can use alternative repositories if you don't).

So OSS can be the solution.

Sadly such solution is not available on the locked-down iOS ecosystem...

Adding to this:

f-droid also encourages reproducible builds: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

This means you can verify the APK on the f-droid store matches what's in github by building it yourself and comparing the signatures.

And if you want to do this, f-droid has an automated way: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Verification_Server/ Of course, you still have to trust the verification server source code, but that runs locally on your hardware and is auditable.

> You could completely trust this app if you could ban it from accessing the internet.

Yes. I have a "no-internet" user group on my linux system. Whenever I want to run an untrusted app I run it under that group.

That's interesting, care to share some details?

Basically create a group and add an iptables rule to it. Something like:

  iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -m owner --gid-owner no-internet -j DROP

And then when you launch the program:

  sg no-internet ./something_fishy

Is there anyway this can be done automatically with apparmor or something similar?

When I built an app for Android back in the day, I had the option to deny it permission to access the internet, for the reason you mentioned above. Unfortunately, iOS did not give me this option to deny internet permission to my app.

Does anyone know if Android still gives this option and/or if iOS now gives this option?

No, Google removed it with an _extremely_ lame excuse.

People use the NetGuard local VPN to achieve this now.

Hmm, after your comment, I just checked Android and it seems as if it's still there for developers to choose to add or not...https://developer.android.com/training/basics/network-ops/co...

But perhaps you were talking about as a user of Android (not an app developer), you no longer have the option to deny a specific app from connecting to the internet. Is that what you meant?

I don't think that option is honoured any longer.

It is not even visible to the user.

Simple: Build the binary you upload to the App Store with the code from the repo ;-p

OSS ist the only solution and finally also governments seem to accept that.

I don't trust most OSes, that includes iOS & Android. My phone is being considered an unsafe device and I don't trust it with the data I'd like to query with an app like this.

I don't even want to have to block the app's access to internet etc. but simply be able to trust it as an OSS app that runs on my linux for tasks like this.

$4.99 upfront to try the app, which has a rating of 3.9/5

Tempted to try it but think the use cases I have for OCR are covered by Google Photos.

Perhaps if Memos offered a freemium version with in app purchases I would slowly build a case for unlocking all the functionality it offers.

A freemium model is exactly what we wanted to avoid :-)

I am confident that the App Store rating does not reflect the current quality of the app. Shoot us an email (team@memos.org) for a promo code if you’re still skeptical.

Are you able to reset the rating in your next iOS release? As I recall this is an option.

Many of the reviewers claim its super slow at indexing, I wonder if its still true for the newest version

We’ve sped up processing by an order of magnitude over the last few updates.

Got a promo code and the indexing was super fast.

I think there's a grace period for you to request a refund[1] in the App Store, if you regret the purchase, even if you've downloaded and used the app. I've done this once or twice in the past, downloaded something, tried it, decided it wasn't right and requested a refund.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084

And aren't 'show HN's supposed to have an easy free way for people to give it a go?

I don't think commenting 'email me at <> for a promo code' counts, link goes to `/hn`, at the least that could be the promo code.

Yep. This violates the rules. This isn't ad space for your app. Should be something like "show and tell" where you show us HN readers what you've built to see something interesting w/o paywall or having to contact someone for access or having to subscribe to something... etc.

Keep It has OCR and search for screenshots, etc., “but” also gets them out of your photos.

https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/

This is really cool, but is it really only for iOS? I have about 6 years worth of screenshot that I would love to be able to text search, but they are files on a Linux box rather than iOS.

You could try Google Photos, it can now search text in images: https://9to5google.com/2019/08/22/google-photos-text-search/.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, though not on this product.

Google Photos was a great product before Google Drive removed local photo sync. It's still fine for people with an online-first/only workflow (Chromebook users?), but is a sad shadow of its former self for 'traditional' PC users.

I used to use google photos, but got creeped away from it after I found it had been building facial profiles of I and the others most frequently in my pictures.

I actually used Google Photos before they screwed around with preventing hotlinking and forcing their frame.

I'm amazed at the ai based tagging but it's sooooooo far from actually useful for me. i know it's hard work and I have no clue how to make it better but I need to be able to make much more specific searches like "offices with posters of sailor moon" or "German shepards" or "white tennis shoes". I have 120k photos and a much as I'm amazed at the categorization it almost never actually helps me find the picture I'm looking for.

We’re currently testing a Mac version - for now it’s iOS only.

I am buying this IMMEDIATELY. Do I need to go through each photo to have them indexed, or does it OCR in bulk based on wherever it detects text?

Feature request: can it also add tags for every day recognized objects with filter composition? E.g. "person lake".

OK, I bought it. Some UI feedback. I got stuck at the "Select Photos" screen. I pressed Next and nothing happens, so I assumed it had crashed or was processing with no user feedback. Turns out you have to select from the list options, so a checkbox appears. It's not obvious at all these are checkbox lists. Please use the built-in toggle controls in iOS!

Argh, additionally you can only select one at a time of "All Photos", "Screenshots" and "None". Don't use checkboxes for this - this is what radio fields are for. Better yet, just index everything at once and let me deselect what I don't want indexed.

Now it's asking me about iCloud Photos. I don't know, man. Just start indexing, then tell me how much data it will use to process the cloud stuff later. Now I have anxiety about saying "Yes Include iCloud Photos" or "No exclude iCloud Photos" because I don't know if I'll be able to change my mind later. And I'm worried when I leave the office it will use up all my prepaid data, so I'm just going to say Exclude.

It would be cool if Memos could do the indexing on my Macbook and beam it to my iPhone via WiFi (no cloud plz)

Bravo! I hear people talking about a web based version which would be cool, I have so many photos I've taken of my drivers license, license plate, random addresses, contacts, etc. Always a hassle scrolling back months worth of photos or retaking just to get the same info again. Bookmarking is really cool! I think having a "Save Contact" quick action would be a really great added feature, but quick email/call is great as well! Well done, mate!

Oh man, I really wish this was available on my Mac and not just mobile. I'm quadriplegic and cannot hold my camera to take pictures, but if I could get my PA to snap pictures throughout the day and then have my Mac process them with an application like this on my iMac… Seriously, my life would be 17.25M percent easier. Seriously.

If the dev is reading this, any chance of a port? There may be some chocolate in it for you!

(Also cash, totally willing to pay cash :-))

There’s prizmo, screenotate, onenote, Evernote...

lol at comments "Google Photos does this" You missed the point: Privacy (⌐■_■)

Will this work for handwritten notes? I was just today taking a photos of my notes with the hope of one day OCR'ing it.

It works reasonably well, but it’s largely dependent on your specific handwriting. Send us an email (team@memos.org) for a promo code if you’d like to give it a try.

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