There are a lot of reasons why I’ve been faithful to Google Photos, and Google Drive in general, over other cloud services. Particularly the ability it has to sort and search through all my photos over the years. Now, Microsoft is baking similar functionality right into Windows 11’s search.
Microsoft is rolling out a significant update to Windows Search for Copilot+ PCs, enabling users to easily find photos stored in the cloud using natural language queries. This is a follow-up to another recent addition, which added semantic indexing and searching for locally-downloaded files. Now, Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs can now leverage that semantic indexing to allow for descriptive searches on files within OneDrive directly within File Explorer.
You can now type phrases like “European castles” or “summer picnics” into the File Explorer search bar and retrieve relevant images from both your local storage and your personal OneDrive account. Additionally, exact keyword matches within the text of cloud files will also appear in search results. By extending this feature for OneDrive searches as well, Microsoft is now providing Google Photos-like functionality for its cloud service and baking it right into Windows 11, at least for some users.
The only bummer here is the fact that this seems to be limited to Copilot+ PCs. As a reminder, the local version of this feature was only for Copilot+ PCs since the feature relies on the NPU that’s located inside these PCs. It’s local, offline AI processing, after all, which other computers would have a tough time doing without an NPU. Since this is technically searching on the cloud, there’s nothing stopping Microsoft from adding a cloud-based version of this feature and roll it out to computers without an NPU. Unless this is somehow still being done locally, it’s a big omission, since Google Photos’ search works on all kinds of phones even without NPUs. But this is pretty cool nonetheless.
This feature is rolling out to Insiders with Snapdragon-powered computers. If you have an x86-based Copilot+ PC, you’ll need to wait. And most users will need to wait anyway—this is a preview version, after all, and it will take a few months to land for everyone else.
Source: Microsoft
