Made mostly obsolete by the release of Apple Intelligence but was helpful beforehand
ML Image Sorter was an app I designed in 2024 at the request of one of my former High School art teachers. He needed a way to sort through thousands of images in Apple Photos and place them into specific albums using very unique criteria such as the style of the image.
To assist him with his request, I thought that allowing him to train his own Machine Learning models on the specific sorting criteria he desired could help him.
Writing the app
Because he works in Apple Photos and already has a very detailed photo organization strategy, I decided to make a macOS app that could take a custom Image Classification model made in CreateML, find images that match the ML model’s criteria, and copy those photos into new Photos app albums named after the model’s classification. I also made the app compatible with sorting photos into folders if he were to decide to use it outside of the Apple Photos app.
Results
The app itself worked flawlessly. However, it was limited to the performance of the Image Classification Model that the user would manually create in Apple’s CreateML application (included with Xcode). I included instructions for my former teacher on how to create an accurate model by providing good model specimen. However, since he could only include so many examples, some classifications were difficult (especially models that attempted to classify images by very obscure differences). Since my primary audience was only one person, I could have done a better job of making it more visually appealing. That said, I got the app in a good enough state to be published on the Mac App Store.
Since publishing this, the Apple Photos app received some pretty hefty upgrades in the form of natural language searching support which allows for a user to search for more specific inquires. This largely makes my software obsolete. However, at the present moment it is still available on the Mac App Store.
App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ml-image-sorter/id6503262847?mt=12