Samsung Galaxy AI vs. Apple Intelligence [Part 6]: Photo and video search in gallery

Do you often spend ages scrolling through your phone’s gallery searching for a specific photo or video? With smartphone cameras getting better, memory becoming cheaper, and our itch to capture every small thing increasing, the number of photos and videos we are taking is growing day by day. However, as the memories in our phone galleries keep increasing, searching for the one that we are looking for keeps getting harder. Fortunately, the era of artificial intelligence is here, and it can help us with the task.

One of the ways the world’s top two mobile brands, Samsung and Apple, are using AI is to help find pictures in our phones’ galleries. The South Korean tech giant is offering it via Galaxy AI in the Gallery app, and the American tech giant is offering it via Apple Intelligence in the Photos app. In this episode of Samsung Galaxy AI vs. Apple Intelligence, we are comparing their capability to search for photos and videos to see which one can find the memory we are looking for with the least amount of user input.

Note: For our Samsung Galaxy AI versus Apple Intelligence series, we are using Samsung’s Galaxy S23 running One UI 7.0 beta and Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro Max running iOS 18.4.1. The Galaxy S23 is an older device, but it handles AI features equally as well as newer devices like the Galaxy S25.

In Samsung Gallery, to search for a photo or video, tap on the icon resembling a magnifier located at the top-right corner of the screen, tap on the text input field at the bottom that says What are you looking for?, and describe what you're looking for. For example, you can type mountains, beaches, Keyword: Flowers, a red Keyword: Car, etc., and Galaxy AI will pull relevant images and videos for you.

In Apple Photos, to search for a photo or video, tap on the icon resembling a magnifier located at the top-right corner of the screen, and describe what you are looking for. Similar to Samsung phones, you can type mountains, beaches, Keyword: Flowers, a red Keyword: Car, etc., and Apple Intelligence will pull relevant images and videos.

To test whether Galaxy AI is better at searching photos and videos or Apple Intelligence, we took the two phones and captured sixteen images, recorded four videos of various objects, and then used their native image libraries to search for a specific photo and video.

Here's what we found (each photo is followed by the keyword used and whether Samsung or Apple passed or failed.

As you can see, on our Galaxy S23, when we searched for a photo or video using search terms that are simple or cover a broad range of things, such as Road, Stationery, TV, Furniture, and Plants, Galaxy AI failed to fetch relevant memories in most cases.

When we searched for a photo or video using search terms that are a little more complex and specific, such as Wipro, Bed, Kia, Scooter, and Flowers, Galaxy AI did an even worse job, as it failed in even more cases. We didn't expect Galaxy AI to be so bad at searching photos and videos.

Apple Intelligence, on the other hand, did a much better job than Galaxy AI.

On our iPhone 16 Pro Max, when we searched for a photo or video using a simple and broad search term (the same ones as we used with Galaxy AI), it fetched relevant results in most cases. When we used a little more complex and specific search terms (once again, we used the same search terms as we did with Galaxy AI), it fetched relevant results in most of the cases here, too.

What’s equally impressive was that the iPhone was performing the task in real-time (as we were typing) and fetched the results with lightning-fast speed, faster than Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S23.

As you can see, Apple Intelligence absolutely crushes Samsung Galaxy AI when it comes to searching images and videos in the photo library. The former can handle simple as well as complex search terms much better than Galaxy AI, fetching relevant results in most cases.

Galaxy AI can also pull up the images you want, but for the most part, only if you use search terms intelligently. Photo and video search using AI is an area where Samsung can learn quite a lot from Apple.