Comment by accrual
1 month ago
> I guess indexing photos offline in phone is not very feasible yet.
There has been a form of on device indexing since at least iOS 12. My understanding is it performs a basic indexing typically overnight when the phone is charging and allows one to perform searches like "dog" or "car" and pull up matching images.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/search-in-photos-iph3...
That's nice but clearly not enough to compete with Google Photos.
Hence why Apple started sending photo hashes to their servers for indexing by default.
There's only so much offline computing power.