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Show HN: Built a desktop app to organize photos locally with duplicate detection

organizer.flipfocus.nl

40 pointsmcvanhassel56 comments

Hey HN!

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!

How does it detect duplicates? Hashing or something else?

It's explained on the main page of the website they posted:

"The app uses advanced hash algorithms to identify duplicate files by analyzing their content, not just filenames."

Sounds like marketspeech for sha256sum profit.jpg ?

It is technically an advanced hash algorithm which analyses the contents.

edit: oh it is built with electron and node.js, so instead of sha256sum it's probably pulling 15 dependencies to calculate it.

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.

$25 for this app is quite expensive.

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.

I am pretty sure the guy spent more effort making it than was put into 2 of these bottle openers: https://www.uncommongoods.com/product/recycled-record-bottle...

As far as I can tell so far, its functionality isn't much beyond a a short script that Claude could generate for me in 30 seconds or I could write myself in 20 minutes.

If you trust Claude for this, you deserve to accidentally nuke every picture you’ve ever owned.

I use Claude to write short, isolated scripts, like something to sort photos based on EXIF data, but I never just trust anything it does. I read and debug every line.

I'd never let a junior dev use one of these models, but I've been coding for 30 years and know how to catch mistakes. It saves a huge amount of time.

Nonsense.

I've done this multiple times and Claude explicitly provided a config parameter in the script to make it "read only" by default.

Regardless, why wouldn't anyone test it on a small subset of your photos before trying it on a full collection? You would do it with a script you wrote personally and you should do it with an LLM script as well.

Care to share what your 20 minute script looks like?

$25 is worth month of food...

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti...

> not sure how much I would pay for it

I am sure how much you'd pay for it!

Zero. Nada. None. Is what you want to pay for it. That's what you just told us in your last sentence.

Thanks for the showcase.

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.

It uses hashing according to the site, so I highly doubt it.

A similar tool is Hydrus Network (and it's FOSS): https://github.com/hydrusnetwork/hydrus

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?

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.

> First, is it just me, or can I not scroll your website (tried different browsers), though I can click the links to hop around.

It is the same for me. Looks like there is an `overflow:hidden` style applied to the body for some reason

Edit: Tried a different browser, there is a cookie popup that was getting blocked. I think that is blocking the scroll

A cookie popup that isn't known to consent-o-matic too.

Because I got the popup, clicked no and I could scroll after.

> First, is it just me, or can I not scroll your website (tried different browsers), though I can click the links to hop around.

His website got big cookie popup, and adblocker remove it. Leave us unscrollable site.

+1. cannot scroll in Firefox

Scrolling works fine in Firefox here. However, there's a consent dialog in front of the website content that some unsophisticated ad blockers will try to hide by making it invisible (without restoring scrolling capabilities), which can cause problems.

I use uBlock Origin... guess that is the most sophisticated OG ad blocker, isn't it?

Sorry. I’m on Safari. I use AdGuard with NextDNS as the DNS option inside. I bought the AdGuard Lifetime Subscription long back. AdGuard works well in Safari.

besides, blaming users (who spend their time going to website, and bringing up the issue to developer) for broken website, is not the best way to go.

maybe there should not be consent screens popups that break? or any popups? or any consent screens? and why there is consent for something anyways? and maybe there should not be any tracking (or at least not broken one)

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.

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.

Firefox 140.0.4

Disabling JS fixes it, so that pretty much confirms it is intentional.

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?

Apple tried this, but The Internet got mad again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584856

And for good reason, since this way you'd be poking your nose into other people's photo collection...

It's easy to imagine merging photos of people in the same scenic spot, but how about the photos of those people in the same hotel room bed doing whatever? :)

Again, in pure Apple style, they had SO MUCH complex math and proxies between them and the image detection system that there would be no way - mathematically proven - that they could see anything.

But the headline says "APPLE SPYING ON YOUR PHOTOS!!11" and that's it. Nobody bothered to spend 5 minutes reading the whitepaper. It was on-device CSAM detection all over again.

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.

Same. But I don’t even care to delete the 90%, because storage is cheap. How about a tool to auto-hide them, thus making the 10% easily viewable.

Would be interesting to try some clustering mechanism on the pixels and show only each cluster‘s exemplars.

> How about a tool to auto-hide them, thus making the 10% easily viewable.

Only problem is the tool would need to read my mind to decide which 10% are worth viewing.

Might as well do a manual delete pass at that point...

IrfanView

Ohhh you don't say ... IrfanView is listed as "working great" in crossover for mac...

Storage is cheap. I suggest focusing on spending the time setting up tools that find and resurface the 10%. Photos widget on iOS, photos shuffle lockscreen on iOS, etc. I’m biased (I worked on those), but anything in that style tools is great.

> Storage is cheap.

That's no good reason to fill it with 20 photos of the same butterfly.

And how will I even find the butterfly? It's lost within the 200 photos of the same hills.

Do not assume I ever pruned photos before downloading them off my phones and cameras, because I did not.

> And how will I even find the butterfly?

Use Llava or similar to generate text descriptions of all of your photos, then search for "butterfly".

Same situation here. Just thinking of printing an album of the last 3 years gives me chills. I recently learnt about "photo culling" software, which is what professional photographers use to skim through all the photo bursts they shoot and pick the best. I didn't try any yet, but you might like to google the term.

https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

FastStone’s even better than ACDSee used to be. Small footprint, free, portable, wouldn’t be surprised if ACDSee was the inspiration for it.

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?

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.

It's not exactly plain English, but tools like Photoprism run tagging models on their servers so you can search your pictures.

Thanks, I didn't know about Photoprism! My phone seems to do similar auto-tagging but I found it to not be flexible enough.

Honestly might do a CLIP powered version myself. I only need image ("similar picture") and language search, doesn't seem that difficult.

I need something like this for Linux.

Please add video and I’ll buy this instantly. I have this problem for videos, but not for images.

How does this compare to the dupe detection in something like immich?

Can’t scroll on your website on Brave iOS 18.

Brave's ad blocker tries to hide a consent popup but fails, leaving an unusable website. That's a bug in Brave, I've already reported it but the more the merrier.

This stuff is why I don't like it when tools ship cosmetic filters with their ad blockers by default, because the website looks broken when the issue is actually Brave (and various other ad blockers) messing up.

apt install geeqie

That's all.

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