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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

This is so not important or even mildly interesting. ML to identify people whom you presumably already know... on your on phone? Why? First of all, neither you nor anyone else will look at most of those pictures ever again, a side effect of us all having phones and our photo albums around all the time. The photos become throwaways and, effectively, go down the memory hole.

If Apple wants to do some on-device ML (which I'm certainly more in favor of than centralized ML which is just a honeypot for abuse), can't they come up with something actually useful?

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I’ve found it super useful, personally, and am really glad both that it’s a feature and that it’s not on the cloud.

They have had a similar feature since iPhoto in maybe 2010, but it has only been on the phone since recently.

I reference photos of people I know all the time as well as use photos to track wiring of projects I work on, etc.

The same infrastructure allows searching for all kinds of different objects as well, which is pretty cool.

Especially interesting to me is to search for “art”. It shows things I’ve tagged, as well as what the model calls art which is often actual art (I’m an artist among other things) but sometimes is weird photo angles and interesting color schemes.

I think it has decent taste, even.

I’m pretty sure this blog article is just about one specific feature. I suspect that they use ML for other things in iOS but for clarity may have focused on one thing here.

That's a terrific use case, albeit super niche. I'm an artist, too. It would be fantastic to have ML help in identifying new paintings or other art (or just ones you don't know) and classifying them as belonging to an artist, movement, school, or period.

I learned this stuff the old-fashioned way, through flash cards, slides, and lots of memorization in art history class. People like you and I can tell if something is more Diebenkorn than Duchamp, but that's a specialized skill that ML could probably duplicate quite well and would be very useful for teaching art and art critique.

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