This is just an ad for their photo service. Which presumably has terrible search features, if it doesn't use AI to analyse them. That's one of the best features in Google Photos!
Ente has reasonably good search[1] powered by on-device machine learning[2].
[1]: https://ente.io/blog/machine-learning
[2]: https://ente.io/ml
My family library is around 1Tb, the weakest device is an iPhone SE, and the most used access is through a web browser.
Does on-device machine learning (provided you're syncing inter-device) work in that scenario ?
Search is yet to be implemented on web and indexing is turned off by default on devices with < 4gb of RAM. You can opt-in from Settings > General > Advanced > Machine learning.
Wow, 1TB of photos? This is just astonishing to me. What is the use of so many images? As an ex semi-pro photographer, one of the things I realized is that what makes photographs special to people, even family photographs, is the rarity of them.
So I just cannot understand taking and holding on to this many images. I would find just managing the images would take away time and money from my family.
Google Photos makes it a no-brainer to manage, which largely contributed to the size inflation (which is also why searching and indexing have become critical to us)
PS: I declared bankruptcy on photo management a long time ago. Reducing my library to a decent size is totally possible but would take months of sifting through near duplicates.
For me the problem is that I'm not a great photographer. I take loads of bad photos. It would take me far too much time to go through all of them and decide which ones to keep.
Also, my wife and I sometimes look at old photos for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the photo or even with reminiscing. Instead, we may look for some specific fact (mole, dental issue, dress, haircut, domestic repairs, flooded footpaths, etc). The more photos we keep, the more likely it is that we can find what we're looking for.
I used Ente once, and it was great, but I am poor, so I just store my images locally now. Not that your service is expensive or not worth it because I think it is.
How so? I was looking for a photo of a grave I took some years ago. In Google photos I just searched for "grave" and if found 2 photos, including the one I wanted.
Without AI I would have to search all my photos. Maybe I could narrow it down by date and location but it would take a lot longer.
So should be possible to have a similar capability locally now.
Brainfart, that should of course be LLama 3.2 Vision 11B. Keep mixing up the model sizes.
I tried it a few months ago however and the upload/encryption was so slow from their desktop app it would have taken weeks to migrate my photos to the service.
E2EE solves all of these issues as long as it's open source and reproducible.
Efforts like these should be praised.
And I really like some of the stuff they are doing.
Their TOTP app is great.
Perhaps more importantly, it only mentions the photos and videos themselves in relation to the advertising. Analyzing the photos (as per the demo in TFA) isn’t “advertising,” and neither is building a user profile.
Then later on, when they use that user profile to allow others to advertise to the user—that’s not “using your photos or videos for advertising” either. Nor is it “selling your personal information to anyone,” since what they’re selling is access to you instead of selling specific personal dossiers.
From where I’m sitting, that still seems to leave the door open to Google itself using what it gleans from your photos to build out your profile, use those insights across their whole company, and target ads at you. It also seems to leave the door open to selling “depersonalized” analyses to third parties, not to mention giving free access to whoever it might see fit (research groups, state actors,…), no?
There’s also a big difference between “doesn’t” and “will never.” Once an analysis with value exists, it seems counter to the forces of nature and commerce for it not to find its way out eventually. Just as the consumer DNA-sequencing firms pinky-swore everything was private, then gradually started spreading people’s genomes farther and wider.
This statement is so simple and so general that it covers everything.
""Google Photos doesn't sell your photos, videos, or personal information..."
This says that they "don't", it very clearly does not say they " won't".
Nowhere does it say they stop using your data.
Google seems especially invested in that kind of stunt. Remember their “ad privacy” consent screens for Chrome—which, ridiculously, framed consent to additional tracking as a “privacy” measure? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227; Aug 2023 / 974 points / 557 comments)
If their CEO's congressional testimony on this point isn't considered binding at Google, verbiage on their website certainly isn't.
> To assuage concerns, Google told Congress and the FTC that it would not combine the user data it got from assets in search, e-mail, or GPS maps with information from DoubleClick about which consumers visited which publications. And so, the acquisition was greenlighted. Ten years later, though, Google did not hesitate to break its promise.
https://www.techpolicy.press/how-us-history-and-googles-own-...
The question of how you opt out of that remains.
Somehow, neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Samsung, nor (probably) any other big tech company, can usefully extract data from photos anymore. Face recognition in particular works like one of those Shabbat-compatible appliances: something gets extracted at some point, eventually, but infrequently, and only when you're not looking - and, most importantly, it's not possible for you to control or advise the process. The AI processing runs autonomously in such a way that you may start doubting whether it's happening at all!
I assume that this is the vendors' workaround around GDPR and such in relevant jurisdictions, but this also makes face search/grouping nearly useless. Don't get me wrong - I'm very much with the EU on data protection and privacy, but getting gaslighted by the apps themselves about the extents of and reasons for ML limitations in those apps, that's just annoying.
Good. The more companies that treat users like humans instead of chattel the better.