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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I do such searches on my iPhone all the time. Especially cat photos. According to the Photos app, my recent searches include "cowboys," "april 2019," "colorado," "trains," "canyons," and "cat."

The iPhone was able to complete all of those searches without sending my data to Apple. When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

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That's only useful if all of the photos that I want to search are already on my iPhone. I can't search from a different device, and I can't search the hundreds of GB of photos from years ago because they don't fit.

> When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

Did Google actually say that? I think they just built a product with different trade-offs than Apple Photos.

If I need to search hundreds of GB of photos, I can with an iPhone, too.

The phone automatically offloads the full-resolution images to iCloud while retaining thumbnails and metadata. The photos on iCloud are encrypted so that even Apple can't see them.

Moving the goalposts doesn't change the fact that everything you want can be done on-device, with none of the privacy-destroying methods that Google has imposed on the world.

And you used to be able to find stuff on Lycos too, but the search quality between Lycos, Altavista, and Google were dramatically different.

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