After drowning in 50,000+ unorganized photos across multiple devices and much frustration, I built FlipFocus Photo Organizer to solve my own problem.
What it does:
* Smart organization - Sorts by date/device/EXIF automatically
* Duplicate detection - Finds duplicates even with different filenames
* 100% offline - Your photos never leave your device
* Cross-platform - macOS & Windows
Why I built it:
A lot of photo organizers either require cloud (privacy concerns) or are manual/tedious. I wanted something that respects privacy while being intelligent enough to handle years of photo chaos.
Tech stack: Built with Electron, Node.js and Angular.
Price: €19.99 one-time purchase (no subscriptions)
The privacy-first approach means everything runs locally, no internet required after download. It helped me create oversight of years of digital photos and save me hours of work I otherwise had to spend manually organizing photos.
Would love your feedback, especially from fellow digital hoarders!
Yay! I'm in the middle of building something like this myself, I guess I'll give it a try ..
Oh, wait:
>Tech stack: Built with Electron, Node.js and Angular. Price: €19.99 one-time purchase (no subscriptions)
.. never mind. :(
No trial period? Using Node.js to touch all my files? Electron: doesn't scale - I have 500,000 photo's to process - think the DOM can handle that? Javascript for such an app? Bummer.
Well, if there's ever a way to try it out, I'll give it a chance, but .. out of the gate .. there's a lot swinging against it. I'll go back to my own Photo organizer app, meanwhile, written in cross-platform C++ and designed to be multithreaded and high-performance, alas .. but I wish you all the best, anyway.
not sure how much I would pay for it. I would consider this only if it was completely free, open-source, and self-deployed. so would use it only at $0.
First, is it just me, or can I not scroll your website (tried different browsers), though I can click the links to hop around.
Second, I’d love this to be like Obsidian. Takes care of the organization without dumping it in a local database with metadata. As part of my digital chores, I back up and export a copy of each month’s photos from Apple Photos. I want to organize them decoupled from Apple’s App. Will “Photo Organizer” do that? The idea is that any Picture Viewer in the future should just be able to browse the folders and show me around, organized into whatever organization pattern I do now.
A bit off-topic, but the point on duplicate detection reminded me of a thought I've had while taking photos on trips, in a swarm of other people doing the same. I've always wondered how much of the ICloud's storage is taken up by duplicate photos across everyone's phones. How many petabyte would this be? Imagine swapping one person out for another, in the same exact location in an image. How many then?
This may be a dumb question, but I couldn't figure it out from the website: Does this app allow me to actually view my photos? Can I double-click a filename? Can I get a page of thumbnails? Some sort of a gallery view?
I suppose this one is great for someone who has 50000 photos they want to keep!
Can anyone recommend a tool like the old old acdsee? Just browse random folders, display a preview and be able to delete photos?
Because my problem is a photo library where I should probably delete 90% of it. But all those advanced photo managers with functions for pros (or even Apple Photos, which I gave up on) make this particular operation extremely slow.
I have a question: Can your tool detect duplicates with lower resolution? A typical use case would be images received via chat apps, which are often downscaled to save bandwidth. If I have a higher quality version, I'd like to keep only the larger one.
Scrolling on your page breaks after a few seconds, leading me to believe it is intentional or even malicious. Does not exactly suggest trustworthy software to me.
One feature that I'd like to see in general in these kinds of collection organizing programs is support for removable storage. Lets say I have photos and videos spread out on multiple external drives, being able to find a photo in the program and then see which device it's on would be very helpful. Obviously you'd only store some metadata about all files in the database, like CLIP embeddings, date, name, a small thumbnail, etc.
I've always wanted a sort of "semantic image store" that I can dump all my photos into and then search for content in English or by similarity metrics.
Have you played around with anything like that? Seems like a locally running CLIP model could do the job.
Can't this be achieved with DigiKam - for free, open source and also on linux? https://www.digikam.org/ I'm not sure if it does all this automatically, if not, why not contribute a feature there?
19 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] threadAfter drowning in 50,000+ unorganized photos across multiple devices and much frustration, I built FlipFocus Photo Organizer to solve my own problem.
What it does: * Smart organization - Sorts by date/device/EXIF automatically * Duplicate detection - Finds duplicates even with different filenames * 100% offline - Your photos never leave your device * Cross-platform - macOS & Windows
Why I built it: A lot of photo organizers either require cloud (privacy concerns) or are manual/tedious. I wanted something that respects privacy while being intelligent enough to handle years of photo chaos.
Tech stack: Built with Electron, Node.js and Angular. Price: €19.99 one-time purchase (no subscriptions)
The privacy-first approach means everything runs locally, no internet required after download. It helped me create oversight of years of digital photos and save me hours of work I otherwise had to spend manually organizing photos.
Would love your feedback, especially from fellow digital hoarders!
Oh, wait:
>Tech stack: Built with Electron, Node.js and Angular. Price: €19.99 one-time purchase (no subscriptions)
.. never mind. :(
No trial period? Using Node.js to touch all my files? Electron: doesn't scale - I have 500,000 photo's to process - think the DOM can handle that? Javascript for such an app? Bummer.
Well, if there's ever a way to try it out, I'll give it a chance, but .. out of the gate .. there's a lot swinging against it. I'll go back to my own Photo organizer app, meanwhile, written in cross-platform C++ and designed to be multithreaded and high-performance, alas .. but I wish you all the best, anyway.
not sure how much I would pay for it. I would consider this only if it was completely free, open-source, and self-deployed. so would use it only at $0.
Second, I’d love this to be like Obsidian. Takes care of the organization without dumping it in a local database with metadata. As part of my digital chores, I back up and export a copy of each month’s photos from Apple Photos. I want to organize them decoupled from Apple’s App. Will “Photo Organizer” do that? The idea is that any Picture Viewer in the future should just be able to browse the folders and show me around, organized into whatever organization pattern I do now.
Can anyone recommend a tool like the old old acdsee? Just browse random folders, display a preview and be able to delete photos?
Because my problem is a photo library where I should probably delete 90% of it. But all those advanced photo managers with functions for pros (or even Apple Photos, which I gave up on) make this particular operation extremely slow.
I have a question: Can your tool detect duplicates with lower resolution? A typical use case would be images received via chat apps, which are often downscaled to save bandwidth. If I have a higher quality version, I'd like to keep only the larger one.
Firefox 140.0.4
Have you played around with anything like that? Seems like a locally running CLIP model could do the job.
That's all.