Comment by mcvanhassel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcvanhassel | Hacker News Reader

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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!

$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...

$25 is worth month of food...

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

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?

> 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.

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.

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