Skip to main content

Album+ with offline A.I. is Google Photos for the cloud naysayers

Album+
Album+ / App Store
Artificial intelligence simplifies things like finding the best shot or deleting duplicated photos to save space on your phone — but machine learning also requires so much space, that these programs are largely cloud-based. That’s changing as A.I. programs get smaller and hardware gets larger and now, for iOS users, there’s an A.I. photo program that can run entirely offline. Album+ is an app by developer Polarr that encompasses a number of features that already exist in apps like Google Photos, but brings them offline.

Using A.I. and computer vision, Album+ can recognize people and objects in your photos, making it easy to search for a specific photo. That same search tool also works with documents and snapshots of receipts.

And if you don’t know exactly what photo you’re looking for but want to find a great shot to share, Album+ will also automatically curate an album of your best shots, or at least what the app thinks are your best shots. A “Discover” option allows you to see what you photograph most by looking at collections created around specific themes or objects.

When those photos start to hog space on the smartphone, Album+ has a feature to automatically detect the worst photos for deletion, along with finding images that are duplicated.

Along with organizing photos, Album+ managed to fit in photo-editing A.I. without the cloud, too. The developer says that the app can automatically enhance all the photos using A.I., along with offering over 100 different filters. Users can also save time by batch editing multiple photos at once.

Album+ doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before — Google Photos has a number of the same tools to search through your photos and automatically categorize them, while apps like EyeEm and The Roll can look through the camera roll to find the best shots. But what Album+ has that’s tougher to find on the App Store is an A.I. system that exists entirely off the cloud. The on-device software is designed to ensure greater security, the company says.

Album+, designed by the same team behind Polarr Photo Editor, is free to download from the App Store, but accessing the full features requires an in-app purchase with a $1.99 monthly subscription or a $12.99 annual option.

Editors' Recommendations

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Watch Google’s 10-minute recap of its AI-filled I/O keynote
The stage for Google I/O 2024.

Google unveiled a slew of generative-AI goodies at its annual I/O event on Tuesday during a packed keynote that lasted almost two hours.

If you couldn’t watch it at the time, or really don’t want to sit through all 110 minutes of it on Google’s YouTube channel, the web giant has kindly shared a video that compresses the best bits of the event into a mere 10 minutes. You can watch it below:

Read more
Everything announced at Google I/O 2024
Rose Yao on Google I/O 2024 stage.

Android, Wear OS, and Pixel may be Google's household names, but it was Google Gemini, its emerging AI technology, that stole the limelight at Google I/O 2024. The company's annual software celebration sets the stage for everything the company has planned for the coming year, and this year, CEO Sundar Pichai unambiguously declared that Google is in its "Gemini era." From AI searches in your Google Photos to virtual AI assistants that will work alongside you, Google is baking Gemini into absolutely everything, and the implications are enormous. Here's an overview of everything Google announced this year.
Gemini takeover

Users upload more than 6 billion photos to Google Photos every day, so it's little wonder that we could use a hand sifting through them all. Gemini will be added to Google Photos this summer, adding extra search abilities through the Ask Photos function. For instance, ask it "what's my license plate again" and it'll search through your photos to find the most likely answer, saving you from needing to manually look through your photos to find it yourself.

Read more
Google Photos is about to get a big AI upgrade
Google's Ask Photos debut.

At today's Google I/O 2024 keynote, the company announced that a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature is coming to Google Photos. "Ask Photos" is a new Google Gemini feature coming to the popular service, which now sees over 6 billion photos and videos uploaded to it daily.

With the new "Ask Photos" feature, you can soon search your photo library using a conversational approach rather than just keywords. For example, Google demonstrated that you can ask Google Photos for your license plate number or for photos of your child swimming over time by simply asking questions such as "What's my license plate again?" or "When did my daughter learn to swim?"

Read more