Project ECHAE

Photo by Matheus Bertelli on Pexels The screenshot that started this whole experiment A friend texted me a link to a gate agent's badge number after a flight got rebooked, and I screenshotted it "just in case." Two weeks later I needed it and had no idea where it was. My camera roll sits at a little over 4,300 images, most of them screenshots I took and never looked at again. I scrolled for eleven minutes before giving up and asking her to resend it. That's the moment I decided to actually test whether the AI search features built into modern photo apps are as good as the marketing suggests. I've written before about building one landing pad for tasks instead of juggling five capture apps, and this felt like the same problem wearing a different hat: I wasn't missing the information, I was missing a way to retrieve it. So over a few weeks I ran the same kind of test against three different tools, using screenshots and photos I could actually verify I...

Photo by Matheus Bertelli on Pexels The camera roll problem nobody talks about Somewhere in the last few years, my camera roll quietly turned into a landfill. Screenshots of receipts, seventeen nearly identical photos of the same sunset, a picture of a parking garage level I took two years ago and never deleted. I don't scroll to browse anymore. I scroll to hunt — for the photo of my kid's shoe size written on a tag, or the whiteboard from a meeting three months ago, or that specific plant I photographed at a nursery so I could remember its name. For a long time, the only tool I had was the search bar, and it was mostly useless unless I remembered the exact date. That's changed. Phones now let you type — or say — a plain description of what you're looking for, and an AI model trained to recognize objects, scenes, and even text inside images tries to match it. I've been leaning on this feature hard for a few months, and it's good enough to change a habit...