Though I share your feelings somewhat - I was completely surprised by what you wrote in the comment higher up about iPhone gallery search. I didn't realize this is possible in a reliable fashion, much less off-line and deployed in a mass market device.

You know that some teens don't even save some images? They store them on specific instagram accounts they make for a specific category. My cousin had an instagram account for close friends (5 people) where she only shared bad things that happened to her during the day. Another one for nice things, etc. All those memories were recorded in app and never saved in the device, only stored as stories on the account. Guess what? She was sad a while ago because somehow she lost access to one of this accounts and so to all those pictures/videos.

Also the fact that some teens save a lot of pics on their devices doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. In 2008 I had folders upon folders of images downloaded from the internet. Now i'm not even sure where they are, probably in some hard drive in some closet. You can be sure that if i remember any of those contents I won't dig up my hard drive, but google them (use a comprehensive global search engine). We have no idea where all this collected data from teens will be in 15 years, it's not unlikely that it will be lost or archived in hard to reach places and forgotten. I've stumbled some times into "meme dumps" where they upload all their memes to a service to free space on their device/icloud.

For sure teens use technology in ways that might be unexpected and counter-intuitive to us, but I don't think that invalidates in the slightly the need of a global search engine for memes. It's a good idea if i want to find a meme that I saw, a need that I don't think will disappear anytime and that's also not a millennial+ only problem.

Count me in. If you asked me about the OCR itself, I'd probably say "yeah, it's mostly been solved for a good decade for print books and articles, but it's unreliable enough". I somehow never considered OCR might have gone better - possibly because my main exposure was through badly OCRed book scans and a built-in OCR in some PDF reader I used at one point.

It definitely didn't occur to me that OCR works well enough on arbitrary images, and it's cheap enough compute-wise that you could do it locally in a casual fashion.

Nice thing you have there in the Apple garden. Over here in Android land, I have the opposite problem. You say:

> This can possibly be the equivalent of “you’ll always have a calculator in your pocket” but equivalent analogy to memory techniques like spaced repetition.

and all i can think of is how I recently became convinced that a Samsung flagship is losing my photos. There's been a couple cases over the past few months when I felt really damn sure I made a set of photos of something (e.g. remodeled kitchen), but when I checked on the phone, it turned out those photos don't exist, or there is maybe just one where I expected 5-10. They aren't in the gallery. They aren't in the filesystem. Poof, gone.

So either I'm getting senile in my 30s, or something is off with the way my phone stores photos. I did a web search for this the other day, there are relatively recent reports on-line complaining about the same thing, but no one has any evidence. I'm thinking about doing an experiment now (basically make extra photos every day and document them in a paper notebook, and check after half a year if the photos match the notes) - but the point of me sharing this is: I no longer trust new tech, smartphones in particular, to handle basics correctly. Much less do something advanced like reliable text search on images.