Comment by c-fe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by c-fe | Hacker News Reader

I love this app, particularly because of the frustration I had with Apple Photos and how bad its search is compared to Google Photos. Playing around with, here are some notes:

- The layout on my 2020 iPhone SE is a bit messed up, the first picture overlaps the search bar which is a bit frustrating

- I am not sure the app uses geolocation. Searching for Paris, it itendified some pictures with typical parisian architecture, but not all. Is it actually possible to include geolocation data? (EDIT: ok, read your other comment about it. Regarding servers, the app is already 300 MB, i think you could hardcode a list of like 10k places (e.g. a circle of e.g. 5km radius around the lat/long center of paris, a circle of e.g. 100km around the lat/long center of a country (or multiple circles).)

- I very much like the privacy conscious no-network-connection aspect.

- PLEASE (if possible) include a link to the original picture in my Photos app, so this way the workflow would be: I search a picture -> I open it in Photos app where I can see the other ones taken around the same time. If that is not possible (which I could imagine is the case), Your workaround of displaying the date and time of the picture is probably the next best thing.

Thanks for making this app!

Thanks for your review. I'm new to iOS, so some of the values for the UI layout are hard-coded, and have only tested it on my iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 14 Pro simulator. Thanks for telling me about its display problem on iPhone SE, I will try to fix it in the next version.

Regarding geolocation, the photo information is available in latitude and longitude, but converting them to specific cities requires access to a geolocation conversion service, which means an internet connection is required, which is not what I would like to see.

Jumping to albums from the app is not allowed, but you can find the 'i' icon at the bottom of the photo detail page, click it and you can see the date information.

Out of interest, are you using SwiftUI or UIKit? With SwiftUI, the layout you have right now should be very easy to write and will work on all displays, if you are not using it that could be worth looking into.

> but converting them to specific cities requires access to a geolocation conversion service

I made an edit to my original comment, you could store certain areas (circle with radius / polygon) and check if given coordindates in that area, but its not something that is crucial for this app to be useful.

> but you can find the 'i' icon at the bottom of the photo detail page, click it and you can see the date information

Yes I saw that, its quite useful, a shame that Apple restricts jumping directly into Photos.

1.Layout I'm using SwiftUI, but I'm having trouble with `Form`(you can see that the shadows below the search box have expanded into the search results area). Will try to solve these problems.

2.Geolocation Yes, I have this plan too: store a large geographic mapping table of major cities and then find the closest known city by some calculations.

3.Date Information haha I think so too.

I have a sqlite database created from open street maps with 6m places all geohashed if you want to add it to the system.

I'm a little afraid that the geographic information file will be too large and further increase the size of the app, so I'll try the simple, but imprecise way first, and if I can't do that I'll come to you, thanks!

It is large but you could probably download it post install if someone wants place names for their photos.

But the most important purpose of this app is not to network lol, so it seems to be necessary to think of other ways.

That's why I landed on a SQLite database too :). It could be drastically reduced by filtering out unneeded locations. 6m is a lot.

you dont need that, check out the implementation here https://github.com/richardpenman/reverse_geocode/ for example

Thank you for the link!

Some more field feedback:

App works beautifully and layout is beautiful on latest iPad Pro 12.9", including in the new iPadOS windowing where you can change the window to arbitrary sizes.

Stage Manager: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/move-resize-and-organiz...

The app also indexed 160,000 photos in a tiny window while running other things (Safari, Teams, Outlook, etc.)

On the overall use case, I found results are on point, far better for descriptions of photos. It only takes about 9 seconds to find good results from the 160K photos.

Glad to hear that. I only have 35,000 photos myself and a search takes about 3 seconds (on iPhone 12 mini). Will consider subsequent speedup optimizations for search.

I searched for "dog" and it found dogs including in cartoons but it also tagged photos of myself as a dog as well. Not sure if it's due to the facial hair or some other trait I share with dogs.

It is using clip embeddings and showing you nearest neighbors, not tagging them or identifying anything in the photo.

Update: UI layout has been optimized to a flexiable way in v1.2.0

I did this last year as a proof of concept. Glad someone is doing it more seriously.

https://twitter.com/getrememberwhen

I recently added faces to it and have it setup for geo searches but too little time to work on it.

You can't link to photos in the photo app sadly.

Wow! There are people in the world trying to do almost exactly the same thing as me. I'll try your testflight version, thanks for letting me know the existence of "remember when?"

At that time last year, I had just had an idea, but was quickly overwhelmed by work. Until I quit my job recently, I had full time to do development. If possible, we may work on something together in the future :)

The latest version uses too much memory so some people have issues with it getting killed. Haven't gotten around to fixing the issue though.

iPhone SE overlap issue has been fixed in new version(v1.2.0). I have submitted a review and you can expect to see this version within 24 hours.

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