AIPhotos

A taste of iOS, with AI features.
The beautiful, private photo gallery for Android that understands your photos without ever sending them anywhere.

100% offline · No accounts · No ads · No tracking · No Internet permission

📱 See AIPhotos in action

Your phone holds years of memories, receipts, screenshots, trips and the people you love. Most galleries either show them as an endless grid or ask you to upload everything to the cloud before they get "smart".

AIPhotos does both jobs on the phone itself. It gives you the clean, fluid feel of iOS Photos, with frosted-glass bars, buttery pinch-to-zoom grids and an iPhone-style viewer. On top of that it adds on-device intelligence: search by describing a photo, find text inside pictures, recognise faces, sort photos into your own categories and clean up clutter. All of it runs on your phone. AIPhotos can't upload your photos even if it wanted to, because it doesn't have the Internet permission.

✨ Highlights

📱 Feature tour

A library that feels like home

• Years, Months and All views. Your timeline is grouped by month with headers that follow you as you scroll.
• Pinch the grid live between 3, 5 and 7 columns. Keep pinching to zoom out to Months, then Years, and spread your fingers to dive back in. Tap a month and you land on its first photo.
• Fast scroller with a month bubble, for jumping through thousands of photos in a second.
• Select by dragging: long-press and slide across photos to select a range. Long-press a selection to drag it into another app (split screen, freeform windows, external displays).

An iPhone-style viewer

• Swipe between photos, pinch or double-tap to zoom, drag down to close.
• iOS layout: the top pill shows where the photo was taken ("Herne Bay") with the full date and time. At the bottom are Share in a circle, a capsule with ♥, Info and Find Similar (Find Moments for videos), and Delete in a circle. In Recently Deleted, the ends become Recover and Delete Forever.
• Videos zoom too: pinch in while a video plays, or double-tap to switch between fit and fill the screen, just like iOS.
• Live video scrubbing: the picture follows your finger frame by frame. You can save any frame as a photo in one tap.
• Ultra HDR photos are shown in HDR on supported screens.
• You land where you left off. Swipe through fifty photos, close the viewer, and the grid is scrolled to the exact photo you stopped on.
• An Info sheet with camera, lens, exposure, size, place and folder, plus any text found in the photo with a Copy button.

Search that understands you

AIPhotos has two search modes, and you can switch between them at any time.

• Details is instant, needs no AI, and works the moment you install the app. It searches by:
• Place: "paris", "pakistan". Places are worked out offline from a built-in world city list.
• Date: "march 2024", "last week", "yesterday", "weekend".
• Time of day: "night", "sunset", "morning".
• Type: "videos", "screenshots", "favorites", "panoramas", "4k", "png".
• Length: "over 2 min", "under 10 sec".
• People you've named.
• Words written in the photo (see Text in Photos below).

Terms combine, so "night videos in london 2024" just works. With an empty search box, the Explore page shows your places, times of day and media types. The keyboard opens as soon as you switch to Search, and the search bar sits right above it. - AI (optional Smart Search) finds photos from a plain description: "kids playing in the snow", "a red car", "birthday cake". You can also use Find Similar Photos, search with a picture, or Live Search, where you point the camera at something and see matching photos instantly.

📝 Text in Photos

AIPhotos reads the words in your photos, on the phone, and makes them searchable. - Type a shop name and get the receipt. Type a Wi-Fi password, a flight number or a quote and get the screenshot. - In AI search, photos containing your words are moved up: to the very top when the words are specific (a brand, a name), and given a gentle lift when they're common. - Open Info on any photo to see and copy its text. - Uses Google ML Kit's text recognizer, bundled inside the app and fully offline. It reads Latin-alphabet languages. - One switch in Settings → Text in Photos. Turning it off deletes every bit of text read so far.

👤 People

• Faces are found with ML Kit and matched with GhostFaceNet, a modern face-recognition model (512-number face signatures) built into the app.
• Faces are grouped into people automatically, using the same two-pass approach Apple describes for Photos. Name people, merge them, fix mistakes, or tag someone by hand. Your corrections are remembered.
• Fix groups in bulk, without labelling photo by photo:
• On a person's page, select photos and choose Not This Person or Move To… another person or a new one.
• In People, tap Select, pick several people, and Merge them or choose Don't Feature.
• Don't Feature a person and they leave People, search and the face badges. New photos of them stay with them, out of sight, and you can feature them again under Not Featured.
• Full control over grouping in Settings → People:
• 15 presets, such as Strict, Relaxed, Family Look-Alikes, Kids Growing Up, Sharp Faces Only, Frequent Faces and Names Lead. One tap regroups everyone right away so you can compare.
• A slider for every setting: how alike faces must be, merge rounds, merging only when clear, the bar for single faces and for joining named people, the blurry-face limit, and how many faces make a person. Three short labels under each slider say what low, middle and high do.
• Names and your own fixes are always kept when regrouping.
• Face badges in the viewer are off by default; switch them on in Settings → People, or use ⋯ → Show People for a single photo.
• Named people work in search: "Ali at the beach".
• Off by default. Turning it off deletes all face data.

🗂️ Categories you describe in words (AI on)

Make your own smart albums without tagging a single photo. 1. Give the category a name, then describe what belongs, in as many ways as you like: "a receipt", "a bill from a shop", "an invoice". 2. Optionally say what to keep out: "a restaurant menu". 3. Slide Strictness while a live preview shows exactly which photos match, with the weakest matches at the end so you can see where to draw the line.

A category matches the same photos AI search finds for its words, so searching "sunset" is a quick way to check what a "Sunsets" category will hold. New photos are sorted into your categories automatically as they're analyzed. When you browse your library, small category pills appear on each photo; tap one to open that category. You can edit or delete a category at any time, and deleting it never touches your photos.

🧹 Clean Up

Free up space in minutes, and keep the photos that matter. - Duplicates: exact copies, confirmed by comparing the actual file contents, not just names. The original is kept. - Similar Shots: bursts and retakes taken moments apart. The sharpest one is kept and the rest are pre-selected. - Blurry: photos that are out of focus everywhere. Portrait-mode photos with a sharp subject and blurred background are not flagged. - Dark or Blank: pocket shots and covered lenses. - Old Screenshots: screenshots older than a month. - Large Files: everything over 25 MB, biggest first, with the size on each tile.

Review before you delete. Tap any suggestion to see it full screen; tap its check mark to select or deselect it. Photos marked to keep can still be selected. Clean Up Settings has a slider for every threshold (how blurry, how alike, how far apart in time, how dark, how large, how old), and changes apply straight away.

Favorites are never suggested for deletion. Everything you delete goes to Recently Deleted for 30 days, so nothing is lost by accident.

🎬 Video tools

• Find Moments: describe a scene ("the goal", "cutting the cake") and jump to the exact second in a long video. Save the moments you like as clips.
• Compress Video: the best settings for each video are pre-selected (for example 4K to 1080p, or HEVC when the phone has a hardware encoder), so one tap is usually enough. Or choose resolution, quality and codec yourself, check the estimated size, and preview before saving next to the original.

And more

• Albums: Recents, Favorites, your folders, Videos, Screenshots, Recordings, Saved Moments, Recently Deleted. Create albums, rename them, and move photos between them.
• Recordings: your voice notes and recordings, playable right in the gallery.
• Use as wallpaper or contact photo, share, favorite, delete with iOS-style confirmation sheets.
• Light, Dark and System themes with frosted "liquid glass" bars.
• Storage & Cache: see and clear every cache, the search index and the model files.

🔒 Privacy you don't have to take on trust

• No Internet permission. AIPhotos removes the Internet permission from its own build, so it cannot send or receive anything. You can check this in Android's app info.
• No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no crash reporting, no cloud.
• Photos, search indexes, face data, text read from photos, categories and photo locations live in the app's private storage and are excluded from backups.
• AI features are opt-in. The one large AI model (for Smart Search) is downloaded by you, in your own browser.

Read the full policy in PRIVACY.md, or view the online privacy policy.

⚡ Fast, light and battery-friendly

All this analysis runs on the phone, so AIPhotos is built to stay out of your way: - Each photo is analyzed once. A single decode gives its text, its Clean Up measurements (a 64-bit picture fingerprint, sharpness and brightness: about 30 bytes per photo) and nothing more. Edited photos are re-checked; everything else is skipped. - Background work pauses while you scroll, while the phone is warm, and when the battery is low. It resumes exactly where it stopped. - Categories cost no extra AI work. They reuse the search index Smart Search already keeps, with a few searches per category rather than a pass over every photo. Changing the strictness slider is instant, and new photos are sorted in batches as they're indexed. - Text search uses a full-text index on disk, so a word is found among tens of thousands of photos in milliseconds, without holding the text in memory. - Duplicates are confirmed by reading just 128 KB of each candidate file, and only for files that already share an exact size. - Thumbnails are sized to the grid, prefetched ahead of your scroll, and swapped for tiny ones during fast flings.

🚀 Getting started

1. Install AIPhotos and allow access to photos and videos.
2. That's it. Your library, Details search, Text in Photos and Clean Up work right away.

Turning on Smart Search (optional)

Smart Search powers AI search, Find Similar, Live Search, Find Moments and Categories. It uses Google's EmbeddingGemma model, running entirely on your phone.

1. Open Settings → Smart Search and turn it on.
2. Tap Download the model. Hugging Face opens in your browser; download embeddinggemma-2-740m.litertlm (about 485 MB) from https://huggingface.co/litert-community/embeddinggemma-2-740m-litert-lm/tree/main.
3. Tap Choose the downloaded file and pick it, usually in Downloads.

AIPhotos uses the file where it is, so it never takes up space twice. If Android won't let the AI engine read that location, AIPhotos offers to move the file into its own storage instead. Your photos are then analyzed in the background, including new ones even while the app is closed. Settings → Smart Search → Test Model shows whether the model loads, how fast it runs, and how many photos are searchable.

Turning on People (optional)

Settings → People turns on face grouping. No download is needed: the face model is built in. If people are mixed up or split, try a preset there (Strict or Relaxed first) and check People after each one.

🛠️ Build from source

Requirements: Android Studio, or JDK 21 with Android SDK platform 37. From Android/src:

./gradlew assembleRelease   # app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk

Or push to GitHub: .github/workflows/build_android.yaml builds the APK and attaches it as a downloadable artifact.

• Package id com.kore.aiphotos. Minimum Android 12 (API 31).
• Release builds use R8 with resource shrinking, keep native libraries compressed, and include only arm64.
• The bundled face model is produced by .github/workflows/build_face_model.yaml, which converts GhostFaceNet to TFLite and verifies it against the original. You only need to run it to rebuild the model.

Under the hood

Kotlin · Jetpack Compose · Material 3 · Hilt · WorkManager · Media3 (ExoPlayer, Transformer) · Coil · Haze · CameraX · LiteRT and LiteRT-LM · MediaPipe Tasks · ML Kit (face detection, text recognition) · SQLite with FTS4.

🙏 Credits

• Started as a fork of Google AI Edge Gallery (Apache 2.0).
• EmbeddingGemma by Google, for on-device search.
• GhostFaceNets (MIT), for face recognition.
• ML Kit face detection and text recognition.
• City data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).

The full list of open-source licenses is in Settings → Open Source Licenses.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

_{Developed by Rehan Sathio.}