Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

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You can do this back in 2021!

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/copy-paste-text-from-photos...

I really want to emphasize how insane this situation is, because I think most tech people won’t realize what’s happening unless it’s pointed out.

If you’re a typical tech person, you probably look at this, go “oh, iOS Photos now OCRs every photo. Cool, that’s 2000 or 2010 era fancy tech, boring these days. And then a search engine on those strings, yeah cool, nothing too mind blowing”. The sheer boring-ness of this by tech people standards meant that this iOS UI change went under the radar.

That’s not true for non tech people.

The people who discovered this, put this to use immediately. You can search up anything from an image now. Old memes? Sure. Forgot the name of a restaurant you went to, but remember that you took a picture of the menu and the beef dish was amazing? Search up the word “beef” and it’s probably in there. Took a screenshot of an article, remember 1 or 2 words from it, but can’t find it on Google? Search for those 1-2 words you remember to find the screenshot, then use the phrases in the screenshot to find the article on google. Trying to find a picture of a cat you saved? Type in ”cat” and search for it. Yes, the photos app can do that too.

Screenshots are cheap and instant. Kids never delete them. It’s like how Gmail “archive” feature in 2005 revolutionized email because you never had to delete an email. Well, iCloud Photos “optimize storage” means that you can effectively store infinite screenshots.

There’s another UX revolution happening in terms of saving information. It’s just that photos became easily instantly searchable, and nobody seemed to have really noticed the implications this has on storing memories, and boosting recollection. This can possibly be the equivalent of “you’ll always have a calculator in your pocket” but equivalent analogy to memory techniques like spaced repetition.

> I really want to emphasize how insane this situation is, because I think most tech people won’t realize what’s happening unless it’s pointed out.

Count me in. If you asked me about the OCR itself, I'd probably say "yeah, it's mostly been solved for a good decade for print books and articles, but it's unreliable enough". I somehow never considered OCR might have gone better - possibly because my main exposure was through badly OCRed book scans and a built-in OCR in some PDF reader I used at one point.

It definitely didn't occur to me that OCR works well enough on arbitrary images, and it's cheap enough compute-wise that you could do it locally in a casual fashion.

Nice thing you have there in the Apple garden. Over here in Android land, I have the opposite problem. You say:

> This can possibly be the equivalent of “you’ll always have a calculator in your pocket” but equivalent analogy to memory techniques like spaced repetition.

and all i can think of is how I recently became convinced that a Samsung flagship is losing my photos. There's been a couple cases over the past few months when I felt really damn sure I made a set of photos of something (e.g. remodeled kitchen), but when I checked on the phone, it turned out those photos don't exist, or there is maybe just one where I expected 5-10. They aren't in the gallery. They aren't in the filesystem. Poof, gone.

So either I'm getting senile in my 30s, or something is off with the way my phone stores photos. I did a web search for this the other day, there are relatively recent reports on-line complaining about the same thing, but no one has any evidence. I'm thinking about doing an experiment now (basically make extra photos every day and document them in a paper notebook, and check after half a year if the photos match the notes) - but the point of me sharing this is: I no longer trust new tech, smartphones in particular, to handle basics correctly. Much less do something advanced like reliable text search on images.

There is a chance that your photos are being backed up by some cloud service and being removed from your gallery. The most likely suspect is Google Photos.

Note that Google photos not only OCRs, but it also does a visual search of objects, faces, scenery etc. and is extremely powerful.

> There is a chance that your photos are being backed up by some cloud service and being removed from your gallery. The most likely suspect is Google Photos.

I have Google Photos upload and backup both disabled.

But then, I'm pretty sure either Google or Samsung SMS app had a "feature" to automatically delete old messages (for a definition of "old" that was neither specified, nor configurable), and it defaulted to ON on my current phone, likely costing me significant chunk of my message archive (that I dutifully transferred over from the previous phone) before I accidentally found and disabled the switch.

So yeah, could be Google Photos deleting it. Or someone else. I don't trust Android as a platform anymore.

BTW. about this "delete old messages" "feature" - most likely this was implemented for performance reasons. But the thing is, you're unlikely to send or receive enough SMS in your whole life for it to take a noticeable amount of space. The irony here is, I do remember a case where the messaging app would become slow and laggy if you had enough texts stored on the phone - but that was solely because someone implemented the message list as a linked list, thus adding a O(N) multiplier to many GUI operations.

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