AI photo tagging
Goal: understand how FrameCourier uses AI to automatically analyse your photos and populate searchable metadata fields.
How it works
When a photo is uploaded to a gallery, a background job sends a downscaled copy of the image to an AI vision model. The model reads the image and populates a set of metadata fields on the photo record. This happens automatically — you don't need to trigger it.
The following fields are populated for each analysed photo:
- Description: a one-sentence natural-language description of the photo.
- Tags: comma-separated keyword tags (e.g. "outdoor, sunset, family, beach").
- OCR text: any legible text visible in the image (signs, banners, receipts).
- Scene type: portrait, landscape, event, food, architecture, etc.
- Setting: indoor, outdoor, studio, beach, church, etc.
- Category: high-level classification such as wedding, portrait, family, corporate, or landscape.
- Dominant color: the most prominent colour in the image.
- Mood: cheerful, dramatic, serene, formal, etc.
Timing and priority
AI tagging runs as a low-priority background task. This means it is processed after higher-priority jobs like thumbnail generation, watermarking, and EXIF embedding. For a typical upload your thumbnails appear first, and the AI metadata follows shortly after.
Because AI analysis takes longer than building a thumbnail, it runs separately as a low-priority task so it doesn't slow down the rest of your uploads.
AI is built in
AI photo tagging is included with FrameCourier and runs automatically — there's nothing to configure. Each AI feature uses our managed AI service:
- Photo tagging — a vision model analyses each image.
- Video summary — a text model summarises the transcript.
- Video repurposing — a text model identifies clip segments.
- Video transcription — speech-to-text generates subtitles.
If an AI job fails (for example, a temporary service error), the system retries automatically before marking it as failed.
Viewing AI-tagged photos
The AI metadata is surfaced through search results — when you search for a keyword that matches an AI tag or description, matching photos appear in the results.
Photos without AI metadata
Photos are analysed automatically when they're uploaded, so new uploads always receive AI metadata. If you notice a photo that doesn't have it yet, just wait a moment — the analysis runs in the background and usually finishes within a minute or two of the upload.