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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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