This build previews Photos for Proton 2.5.0. The headline addition is on-device semantic photo search: describe a photo in plain words and it finds it, with the matching running entirely on your phone. This build also adds a GIF maker for videos, a batch of face recognition accuracy and stability improvements, a more accurate duplicate finder, and smoother zoom in the viewer.
Installs over your current version and keeps your data.
New
- Search your photos by describing them. Type what you remember, like "snowy mountain" or "birthday cake", and matching photos surface. Indexing and search run on the device; turn it on in Settings and the model downloads once. (#99)
- Turn a video into a GIF. Trim a clip, pick a size, and save or share the GIF; a cloud video's GIF uploads back to your library.
- Play GIFs in the grid and on album covers. Two settings, off by default, animate GIFs in the photo grids and animate a GIF album cover, cloud covers included.
- Auto-merge likely-same people. An opt-in setting accepts the strongest same-person suggestions for you, so a person's photos gather without tapping through each one. (#5)
- Show or hide individual timeline categories. Next to reordering Favorites, Screenshots, Selfies and the rest, an eye toggle hides any of them from the timeline and search category bars.
- Separate compression levels for photos and videos. Pick a quality level for each type independently when upload compression is on. (#108)
- Open a trashed cloud photo to view, restore or delete it, and see its name in the trash. (#96)
- Tint the backed-up and cloud badges with your palette accent. A setting matches the small photo badges to the accent colour.
Fixed and improved
- People stays accurate after merging, moving or hiding photos, and a photo's faces are reused when it backs up instead of being detected twice, so a person's photo count is right. (#5)
- Face scanning resumes when Wi-Fi comes back, and a single stuck photo during "Find more photos" no longer freezes the whole scan. (#95)
- A rescan keeps the names you gave, and destructive face actions ask before they change anything. (#5)
- Faces and names survive signing in after using the app without an account. (#12)
- Face tagging in the viewer no longer collides on group photos, so each unnamed face gets its own tag. (#5)
- A more accurate near-duplicate finder groups more genuinely similar shots and drops false matches from flat or blank frames. (#96)
- Smoother transitions and zoom in the viewer, and a pinch right after swiping to a photo now zooms it. (#113)
- AI model downloads keep running in the background with a progress notification, so leaving Settings no longer stops them.
- A tidier mosaic layout on sparse days, and a face-index export can be shared straight to another app.
- Clearer error messages in the viewer and albums, and a failed add to an album is reported instead of dropped silently.
- Reclaimed memory and storage from image caches, abandoned video exports and stale download resume data.
What to test
Please try semantic search most: enable it in Settings, let the model download, then search plain descriptions of your own photos. Also test face recognition (naming, the opt-in auto-merge, a rescan keeping names, and signed out with no account), the GIF maker on a video, and hiding categories from the timeline. Installs over your current version and keeps your data.