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Ask HN: Machine learning based search on my macOS with Spotlight?

2 points by franciscop ↗ HN
So apparently now when I search something in my Macbook Air M1 with Spotlight it will AI-search all of my pictures as well. Is this new? Where can I read more about this feature? Is it possible to disable it? I have thousands upon thousands of pictures so I'm surprised, has macos scanned them all in the background? Or is it dynamically done on-search? (it feels too fast for the latter).

PS, for context, I'm building my own picture management app with Electron so I'm interested in anything like this, it's a feature I planned to add to have a one-up but seems like no longer.

2 comments

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smoldesu
It should just be OCR indexing. Anything you import into Photos can be scanned with OCR passively (maybe with mdworker), and it probably adds those contents to your Spotlight index. I don't really think machine learning plays a huge role in it, unless the OCR solution is ML-based.
walterbell
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-peopl...

> Photos uses a number of machine learning algorithms, running privately on-device, to help curate and organize images, Live Photos, and videos. An algorithm foundational to this goal recognizes people from their visual appearance. Photos can also learn from identity information to build a private, on-device knowledge graph that identifies interesting patterns in a user’s library, such as important groups of people, frequent places, past trips, events, the last time a user took an image of a certain person, and more. The knowledge graph powers the beloved Memories feature in Photos, which creates engaging video vignettes centered around different themes in a user’s library.