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How image search works at Dropbox

189 pointsby hyzylaabout 4 years ago

21 comments

tb99about 4 years ago
Hi everyone, I wrote this post. I didn't notice it on hn until just now, but I'm happy to answer any questions about it.
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eplanitabout 4 years ago
I'm more and more motivated to just cobble together my own dropbox (I know that several folks here have done just that) for my simple needs, to be what dropbox originally was. Their ui has become ridiculous, and 'features' like image spy serve them more than me.
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rock_artistabout 4 years ago
Image search is great. But in terms of photo backups Dropbox is inferior to Apple&#x27;s iPhoto&#x2F;iCloud (I&#x27;m aware of Apple&#x27;s ability for better integration) but still Google photos is much more functional.<p>I&#x27;m not asking for much but:<p>- better caching. Their thumbnails slows up badly trying to go back few years ago. - better organization, search is great but I also like basic ability to visually search and organize content myself. - live photos support...<p>And bugfixing... I&#x27;ve actually had very bad communication with them after they&#x27;ve broke HEIF copy paste on older iPhones... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talaviram.com&#x2F;uncategorized&#x2F;when-did-dropbox-customer-service-went-bad&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.talaviram.com&#x2F;uncategorized&#x2F;when-did-dropbox-cus...</a>
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golergkaabout 4 years ago
I didn&#x27;t know that they do that, and now that I know, I&#x27;m not sure if I ever wanted to use that feature and feel a bit uneasy about Dropbox scanning all my private photos.<p>It really feels like &quot;your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn&#x27;t stop to think if they should&quot; situation.
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basseqabout 4 years ago
The overwhelming sentiments of comments on this is negative, but as a fairly non-technical audience far removed from ML, I find this pretty fascinating.
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londons_exploreabout 4 years ago
This is pretty basic keyword-category-vector stuff, and the results sadly match.<p>Try searching your dropbox for &quot;the day I took a bunch of photos on the subway on the way to work&quot;, and you&#x27;ll see none...<p>Yet dropbox probably has all the info to answer that search - they can parse the natural language query, they can detect when multiple photos were uploaded on the same day, they can look at location and time tags and see which ones might be &#x27;on the way to work&#x27;. They can see which photos might visually look like they were taken on a subway.<p>How about &quot;Me on dress-silly day&quot;. Again, no matches. Or &quot;My broken arm&quot;. No matches. But I totally have that image.<p>Dropbox need to take a step back, and consider that for each query there <i>probably is</i> a correct answer. And they need to track what the user types, and which image they eventually view, as training data to refine their algorithm.
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vishnumohandasabout 4 years ago
If you have concerns about unencrypted storage of personal photos, I’d request you to check out my project: ente.io[1]. It is essentially Google Photos, minus search capabilities, plus end-to-end encryption.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ente.io</a>
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heipeiabout 4 years ago
I haven&#x27;t used the feature, but the way it&#x27;s implemented feels overly complicated, especially for something like keyword search (and not similar-image-search).<p>If they only use the Top10 categories in their feature vector for the documents, why don&#x27;t they store these categories as tags on each documented and use standard inverted-index searching and scoring. I know the vector will express how much &quot;beach&quot; a certain image is, but your user-supplied query doesn&#x27;t have a notion of how &quot;much&quot; beach the user expects, so the output can be a simple list ranked using standard term search mechanisms. What am I missing?
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ant6nabout 4 years ago
I have a dropbox with Directories for all my projects. Let’s assume I also want to upload all my personal photos. Then I wonder<p>- how do I keep the photos separate from the projects (which also includes images)<p>- how will my photos go from my familys camera phones to the Dropbox?<p>- how do i go look at photos scrolling through dec 2018 on my phone for the next 2 min?<p>To me Google photos and drodpbox are conceptually different - photo albums vs files in Directories, and i can’t wrap my head around how albums could work in Dropbox.
emehrkayabout 4 years ago
Cosine similarity is a great little tool to have in your box. When you have a map[dict|obj] with key =&gt; val(float) it is an easy way to compare a bunch of them. Years ago I threw together an example in JS<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;25o78yzt&#x2F;3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;25o78yzt&#x2F;3&#x2F;</a>
johnwalkrabout 4 years ago
Between this type of searching and GPS tags, image libraries are such a joy to maintain and use compared to 10+ years ago.
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Arathornabout 4 years ago
Didn&#x27;t Dropbox used to be E2EE? Is the indexing clientside (like Apple) or serverside?
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Graffurabout 4 years ago
Unfortunately for Dropbox, Google Photos is by far the best at this.
phenkdoabout 4 years ago
Searching with text tags seems a bit odd, couldn&#x27;t you search-by-example with image embeddings? or is the scale too large for an ANN to handle?
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gatestoneabout 4 years ago
I have Dropbox Plus. Image search only works on Professional? I am pretty happy with iPhone&#x2F;iCloud image search. I sync to Dropbox and Google Photos as a backup. But my older photos are only in Dropbox. I am considering copying it all to iCloud, to have better management of it all.
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blntechieabout 4 years ago
One thing which annoys me with lot of these tech blogs are that they don’t support RSS. I would like to subscribe and read them as lot of these information are generally a good read and learning.<p>To be fair, they have a neat feature to subscribe for their new posts by email but somehow RSS is harder?
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programLyriqueabout 4 years ago
Image search is one of the pain points when you want to deploy your own cloud, and what I&#x27;d miss compared to Google Photo or that image search in Dropbox.<p>Is there something like that in Nextcloud for instance? I am aware of a basic face recognition app (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matiasdelellis&#x2F;facerecognition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matiasdelellis&#x2F;facerecognition</a>)
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rainboiboiabout 4 years ago
Took them long enough to apply EfficientNet on images
stuaxoabout 4 years ago
TIL there is image search in Dropbox.
h0ndabout 4 years ago
I rather not want Dropbox to know about the contents of my images.
slowhand09about 4 years ago
Nice try Dropbox. Dollar to donuts they are using Mechanical Turk....
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