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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

I use both Google Photos and Apple Photos and honestly, most of the "suggestions" from Google Photos are uncompelling. When I switched back to iOS a few months ago, I didn't find anything keeping me from moving primarily to Apple's solution. The most impressive automatic-photos-adjustment thing I've seen is in Lightroom now - and Adobe wouldn't be my first guess for AI leader.

I find this to be a general trend with Google: they may have more advanced AI, but haven't yet figured out super-useful ways to apply it.

They also are perfectly willing to undercut their own AI to serve business goals: the Assistant on my Pixel wouldn't even let me do "hey google set a timer for five minutes" if I didn't give Google my full location history. Because you need that to set timers...

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OK I guess we have a different experience. As an iPhone user who uses Google Photos I find it to be quite a lot ahead of Apple's solution. It isn't really the filters it's more the search feature. I can search for "pets with children" and it will give me accurate results. Apple doesn't come close.

That would explain it. I do my photo browsing by time, not by search.

I've _tried_ searching in Google Photos before, it just didn't work reliably enough for me try it more frequently (usually searching for more specific stuff than something like "pets with children," though I can't recall any exact examples right now). Searching for location works well, but that's not very hard.

Anecdata, perhaps, but I have noticed that Google's photo searching by content has greatly improved as of late. Searches that failed for me around Christmas of last year now work perfectly.

For me, the killer ML use case in Google Photos is object recognition.

For example, I took a picture of my driver's license a year or so ago, and needed the number on a form recently. I just went to Google Photos and searched for "driver's license." Sure enough, the old picture showed up, even though I never manually tagged it.

Yep, I did this exact same thing and was pleasantly surprised it was able to pull up my passport photo.

The same is done in the photos app on iOS and macOS, all locally on device. I don’t have a picture of a drivers license, but I just tried “license plate” and “receipt” and both brought back all relevant results.

Which is mostly useless when you have only 20GB of storage.

OTOH, if I ask Google Photos to show me pictures of me on the beach with my friends X and Y, it shows me a picture from 2005, of exactly what I asked. (literally "me on the beach with X and Y").

And if I ask for pictures of me and my friend Z in a party, it shows me pictures of me at Z's wedding 4 years ago. (literally "me with Z in a party").

Luckily iPhones 7 and up have up to 256GB of storage

Which photos seems to think is full whatever I do.

Assume you mean the 20GB limitation being iCloud storage? Both iOS and macOS Photos can “optimize photos storage” and will build index of full library without needing to keep photos on device after they’re analyzed / indexed.

Don't you carry your driver's license in your wallet? It's just weird to me that someone would think "I need my driver's license number, so I'll search through an online photo archive."

I’m not OP, but I’ve had similar experiences. I don’t carry my license in my wallet because I live in a foreign country where my license is useless (we have a different form of government ID), but I do still need it for occasional administrivia back home.

You should try Adobe's iPad apps. They use AI enhancements very wisely throughout this ecosystem.

Some logic (be it faulty or not) brought me to wonder; isn't Google's lead in AI a direct result of sitting on figuratively all the data in the world?

That must account for a huge portion of their advances, right?

Yes, the most data and the best AI people together means Google is always miles ahead IMO.

Their advance is because they have two geeks at the helm that have been dreaming to have AI to respond to search queries since pretty much the beginning of the company.

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