Searching for what it is about
Most of the time you remember what a thing was about and not a single word of it. Relic can work with that. A search for that article about burnout turns up a link titled Why ambitious people plateau, even though the word burnout appears nowhere in it.
Word matching still runs first and still wins when it is right. Meaning is a second pass that pulls in things the words missed, so a search never gets worse for having it on.
The text inside a screenshot
Relic reads the words in your pictures. A photo of a boarding pass becomes findable by gate B12 or by Condor Air, the same as if you had typed them. Screenshots of error messages, receipts, and slides all work this way.
The reading happens once, shortly after the item arrives, and the words are stored with the item from then on. While it is happening the row says Analyzing… under its title.
Titles for photos and notes
Relic can also write a short title for an item that came in without one, and add a few topic tags. That is what makes a photo searchable by what it shows rather than by its filename. It runs on the items you keep, and on every photo.
This one is off until you ask for it, because it downloads a large model and takes about a second per item in the background. Turn it on when you want your pictures named.
What has to be on
All three live in Settings›Search and AI, under the main On-device smart tags switch. Turning that off turns off everything below it.
Everything here runs on your own computer. The models sit in a folder on your machine, the work happens there, and nothing about your items is sent anywhere for it. The full list of what each model does, how much space it takes and how much CPU it may use is on AI on your device and Settings: Search and AI.
On a phone and in the web vault
The models run on a computer. Your phone and the web vault do not run them, so on those two:
- Words, titles, notes, tags, operators and dates all work exactly as they do on a computer.
- Text a computer already read out of a picture travels with the item, so that boarding pass is still findable by gate B12 on your phone.
- A picture that only ever existed on a phone has not been read yet. It gets read once it reaches a computer.
- Searching by subject is a computer thing. Elsewhere the same query falls back to matching words.
If a search works on your laptop and not on your phone, this is usually why. The item is there either way.