Keeplea and Apple Photos

Apple Photos already does more than most people use. It reads text in your pictures, it recognises objects, and searching receipt or menu or a brand name will usually surface the shot. That is free, automatic, retroactive across everything you have ever taken, and it needs no app.

Apple is also moving further into this exact territory. The next release files utility photographs into their own folders rather than leaving them in the stream — Apple’s own framing is that some photos are records rather than memories, which is the observation this app was built on.

So the case for doing nothing is stronger here than anywhere else in this comparison.

What Apple Photos is for

It’s the place your pictures live. Its job is to give you back the photograph — and it is excellent at that.

Keeplea’s job is to give you back the thing in it. The model number as a model number. The colour code as a colour code. Something you can list, filter and copy, rather than squint at.

	Apple Photos	Keeplea
What comes back	The photograph	The details, read off the photograph, as fields
Organising	Automatic, by date, place and face	By what the thing is
Keywords	Manual, if you add them	Read off the object
What it holds	Every photo you take	Only what you pointed at it
Cost	Free	Free to start, then a subscription
Install	Already there	One more app

The two differences worth the extra app

The stream is the problem, not the search. Search finds a photograph when you know roughly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t help with the other half — the fact that eleven months of paint tins, parking levels and router stickers are sitting in the same roll as your holiday, making both harder to look at. Keeplea is a second place to point the camera, so the first one stays what it was for.

A detail beats a picture when you need to act. Finding the photo of the boiler plate isn’t the same as having the serial number. You still read it off the screen, still type it somewhere, still get a digit wrong on a plate that’s been behind a cupboard for six years. Keeplea reads it once and keeps it as text.

What Apple Photos is better at

Everything you never thought to photograph. Keeplea only knows about deliberate captures. Apple Photos has the whole roll, including the shot where the answer is accidental — the sign behind somebody’s head, the menu on the table. Deliberate capture doesn’t replace that, which is why these two sit side by side rather than one replacing the other.

Faces, places, dates, memories. Not Keeplea’s job at all, and it shouldn’t be.

Using both

That’s the intended shape. Apple Photos keeps the year you had. Keeplea keeps the things you photographed on purpose and would rather not scroll past.

If searching your roll already gets you to the boiler serial in under a minute, you don’t need anything else. If you’ve tried that and come back with a wall of thumbnails, that’s the gap this fills.