Often, I just habitually pull out my phone and press the shutter; I might photograph food or a scene, or perhaps there’s no reason at all and I just open the camera and snap a picture.
Many photos, I may take and then forget about them. Maybe a long time later, when I'm backing up my photo album, I'll discover that I had taken some photos.
If you're like me, with your phone filled with thousands of photos, then you'll likely find the feature I'm introducing today quite interesting.
Album 'Search' Feature
For this example, I'm using an ROG Phone 8 equipped with Android 14 system. If you also have the Android 14 system, you might have similar features, and the iOS system's album also has similar capabilities.
Let's start with the basics: you can directly enter a month in the search function to quickly filter photos from that specific month.
You thought it was over? No, there’s more fun to come, but it's suggested to enable a setting first.
↪︎ After entering the album, click on the '...' next to the search to open settings and find an option called 'Discover.'
This option should be enabled by default. With this function active, the saved photos will automatically generate some 'English' tags, and you can search the album using these tag names.
↪︎ If you need tags in languages other than English, start by clicking on the album’s search field.
↪︎ Then click on the '...' next to the search bar again to install additional language packs.
What’s in the Tags?
There are too many to list in this article; basic tags like 'food' and 'sky' are just the beginning. You can type any English letter in the search, and the system will automatically list all the corresponding tags.
For example, I typed 'a' in my album's search page.
↪︎ These are the tags related to 'a' I can see in my album, including location markers.
Some keywords don't show specific tags when entered, but the search is still effective. For example, 'dessert.'
I think what makes this search feature fun is the 'uncertainty' of what you'll find because the tags are assigned by the system, and we don't know what annotations the system has made on our photos, so searching brings a sense of surprise. I often see tags that even I'm not sure what will turn up, and clicking on them can lead to revelations. Of course, sometimes the system identifies something completely irrelevant, which can also be a surprise.
On the ROG Phone 8's promotional page, there's mention of a 'smart photo search' feature, described as 'using AI technology to easily search past photos through natural language text.' I'm not quite sure if this description is exactly what we're discussing here. From what we can see, the auto-tagging feature certainly does reflect the capability of image recognition technology to identify and label a wide array of objects.
If your phone is already full of thousands of photos, like mine, you should also find a lot of fun in the album's search function.
