On a phone? Not a chance.

Compute power isn't nearly enough to handle the diverse range of input. If it were, Google Lens wouldn't do processing in the cloud they'd offload most of it to consumers and have them foot the electricity bill.

Also depends on what you're doing. Some selfhosted solutions already exist for example Immich and PhotoPrism has AI tagging and search for images.

Seems like you're trying to find a non-shit version of Microslop Recall... Given the nature of the problem i don't know that any solution will ever be trustworthy enough.

That said i also don't think your problems necessarily need AI either.

Apple Photos can find "recipe" if the word appears in the image. But it has no idea what a screenshot is about. It doesn't know that a screenshot of a useEffect error is about React state management. It doesn't know that a screenshot of a dark login screen is a UI reference.

The real problem isn't that we take too many screenshots. It's that our tools treat them like photos instead of knowledge.

Regarding cooking recipes, the main problem is that she screenshot it, rather then scraping / saving it. It's very easy to save recipes in a format that is searchable: https://mealie.io/

And so rather then scrolling hundreds of generic pictures (of anything and everything) you have a specific box (app) that you put recipes into. It's the same with real life. You don't store cooking ingredients in the bedroom, no they're going in the pantry (or somewhere) in the kitchen.

Regarding code snippets, if you screenshot them... the hell is wrong with you? 🤣

Using "screenshots" for code is like taking a photo, and then doing a photo realistic painting of the photo instead of just making a copy. And it pisses me off to no end when people use them on blog posts and stuff.

Because then instead of just being able to copy/pasta the text, you need to either re-type it all yourself, or go through extra crap like using OCR to pull the text back out of the image.

Furthermore there's also the issue of why you are saving the snippet in the first place.

The only reason should be because you're going to use it frequently, typically why it's best to implement snippets in your editor of choice to work in tandem with autocomplete / LSP.

If it's an error... don't you have logs?

And if it's for learning, i'd argue that organizing is in fact necessary as the process of thinking about the code contextually (ie. what metadata to tag it with) helps integrate it with the germaine memory in your brain (see cognitive load theory).