What is the plan for discovering photos (search, tags, albums)?

[bnigh]

From discord and various github issues, it sounds like there is ongoing effort to refactor the tagging system and search (web (#1021)). Since there are a number of github issues related to search, tagging, and album management, I thought it may be better to pose this question / start a discussion in a new thread.

Questions

Given that discovery is such a large scope, what is the plan for the current refactoring?

Beyond the current refactoring, what is the vision for the various ways a user may discover photos?

• for example:
  • via scrolling through the timeline
  • via a manually created album
  • via a tag (either applied manually or by ai... this may have some overlap with albums) (related to [Feature]: Discussion - Use tags in replacement (or additionally to) albums #838)
  • via search / filtering (related to [Feature]: Search function on web #1021)
  • via global map (related to [Feature]: Global Map #238)

Specifically for albums / tags, as a user's data set scales, how will they discover what tags / albums are available to choose from?

• for example:
  • via scrolling through available albums / tags
  • via some nested / hierarchical structure (related to [Feature]: Nested albums #1010)
  • via search / filter (related to [Feature]: Search albums when adding photos to an album #1008)

Specifically for search,

• what attributes will users be able to utilize in the search?
• are there future plans for queries using logical operators?
  • for example:
    • If I have different metadata (tags) or albums for 2 pets (pets/max, pets/luna), would it be possible to search for photos only containing bother max and luna (photos with tags for both pets/max and pets/luna / photos belonging to albums for both pets/max, pets/luna)

Motivating Use Cases

For my personal photos, I haven't yet curated with appropriate metadata, but the following are some different patterns I could imagine for discovering / finding a particular photo or set of photos:

• I would like to find photos by a specific date / date range
  • the existing timeline gives an excellent experience for this
• I would like to find photos by a specific event (ie: 2022 Thanksgiving)
  • the event would need to be manually added metadata (tag / album)
• I would like to find photos by person / pet
  • the person / pet metadata could be added manually, by ai, or by a mix of both
• I would like to find photos by location
• I would like to find photos by thing (object / items / activity) within the photo
  • this metadata could be added manually, by ai, or by a mix of both

[dfb]

AI-based automatic annotation is becoming doable, and in theory could deliver a lot of the motivating use cases, see e.g. https://jiahaoli.net/omniquery/