For a few years I already treated the photos on my iPhone are me extended memories.
I’ve been known and admired among my friends and ex co-workers of nearly two decades of quick at pulling out photos of relevance of the topics we were talking about.
I thank that for iPhone Photo app’s quick search with range of dates, locations.
That capability has been keeping me honest and demonstrating seemly good memory at recalling a special occasion’s major events. And that’s one major reason I eventually gave up google photos and switched to save all my photos to iCloud for a more seamless user experience including visual memory enhancement.
Occasionally I had some slight concerns about the thoroughness of these search results. Are they one hundred percent accurate based on my search criteria? What if the results is short of 10 photos of that day of that month of year I was inquiring?
But, I immediately brushed off my concerns: does it really matters if your memory missed that extra ten photos you took ten years ago, as long as you got another thirty photos to help you to recall what had happened.
With this reasoning I had been pretty content with my extended memory built by the enormous photos I’ve been taking through the years and accessibility at the tips of my fingers.
I stopped forcing myself to rehearse and reinforce my memory of an important event just had happened. I just pointed and shot and tagged a few keywords. As long as I had a way to remember the keywords, rough range of the dates I will “remember “ them when I need them.
Then, about two weeks ago, I suddenly found out the search function on my iPhone returned nothing whenever I typed in a range of date or a keyword.
It took a week before I started to realize how scary it became, and this inconvenience reminded me that I was relying on it more than I thought I was. My memory was partially GONE when iPhone failed to retrieve the photos with specified dates or keywords.
I bet it’s something similar like going through dementia. Your thoughts or your conversations suddenly went to blank because you lost the relevant pieces of information stored in your brain (iCloud!). You opened your mouth trying to mumble some intelligent words but you suddenly had no substance in your thoughts. You stopped, squinting your eyes hard (staring at your iPhone screen hard), nothing came out (iPhone display “no results found”). You were at lost.
I even went to Apple community to see if my problem was not alone and sure it indeed was an issue even reported as early as 2023!
There were a few speculations and workarounds. I tried one but seems no help.
Nobody claimed victory which is common in the tech support community. People always posted problems but rarely reported back when the problem was gone and how they solved them.
I suspected mine was somehow related to the Apple Intelligence beta version I turned on two weeks ago. I turned it off but according to the discussion I need to log out of iCloud and login again. But this turned out to be a very destructive operation as it will wipe out all local content and restock from iCloud again. I had the feeling this was more or less a cloud content indexing related issue. How am I trusting the re-sync from ground zero would work properly?
I decided to move that operation as the last straw till last minute my “dementia” gone worsen to a possible no-turning back moment.
I found this experience rather amusing. I paid extra attention to my thinking path when I tried to find a certain passed events by date or keywords first, if no results found, I would start to try photo locations and “near by” photos feature (which was not impacted by the bug), photo people face recognition etc. I was curious if a dementia patient was able to work around like that.
Then, today, I noticed I could search by a specific date, or a specific keyword AGAIN! What a relief!
As always, I immediately moved on and enjoyed my restored super long term memories from searchable photos at my finger tips.
