Keeplea and Google Photos

Google Photos is the strongest thing in this comparison, so let’s start with what it does.

It’s had optical character recognition since August 2019. Search wifi and it finds the router sticker. Search a brand and it finds the box. That covered wifi passwords, business cards and receipts seven years ago, free, on a phone you already own — and Ask Photos now answers some questions in sentences rather than in grid results.

Any page telling you Google Photos can’t find your screenshots is selling you something.

Where the two part company

Google Photos is a place your photographs go. All of them, in the order you took them, and its job is to give you the picture back.

Keeplea is somewhere else you point the camera on purpose, and its job is to give you the thing back — the model number, the colour code, the expiry date — as a record rather than as an image you then have to read.

	Google Photos	Keeplea
What comes back	The photograph	The photograph, plus the details read off it as fields
Where the answer lives	In the picture, for you to read	In a record you can list, filter and reuse
What it holds	Everything you shoot	Only what you pointed at it
Finding by meaning	Text search since 2019; Ask Photos for questions	Ask in ordinary words
Cost	Free, up to your storage quota	Free to start, then a subscription
Already on your phone	Yes	No

The three differences that actually matter

Your holiday and your boiler are in the same pile. Every utility photograph you take lands in the same stream as the photographs of people you love, and both get worse for it. Scrolling back through a year to find a paint tin means scrolling past a year of your life; keeping the pile tidy means deleting things you might need. That’s the split Keeplea exists for, and it’s not a feature Google Photos is missing — it’s a different job.

A record beats a picture when you need to act on it. Finding the photograph of the appliance plate is not the same as having the model number. You still squint, still type it into a search box, still get a character wrong. Keeplea reads the plate once and keeps the model, the serial and the date as text, so the next step is a copy rather than a transcription.

You can check what it told you. Ask Photos is labelled experimental, and Google is careful to say it hands lookup back to the gallery. For which paint did I use, a confident wrong answer costs you a trip to the shop and a tin of the wrong green. Keeplea’s answer is always attached to the photograph it came from, so verifying it takes a glance.

What Google Photos is better at

Everything you didn’t think to capture. Keeplea only knows about things you deliberately photographed. Google Photos has your whole roll, including the picture where the answer happens to be in the background — the street sign behind your friend, the menu on the table. Deliberate capture doesn’t replace that, which is why these two work best side by side.

Faces, places and dates. Not what Keeplea does at all, and it shouldn’t be.

Using both

Most people should. They’re not competing for the same photographs — Google Photos keeps the year you had, Keeplea keeps the numbers you’ll need, and neither is trying to do the other’s job.

The honest test is what happens on a Tuesday when the boiler stops. If searching your camera roll gets you there fast enough, you don’t need anything else. If you’ve done that search and come back with four hundred pictures and no model number, that’s the gap.