Photo Gallery

A fast Windows desktop gallery for a large local photo library — built for a quarter-million photos and videos in a OneDrive-synced Pictures folder. It finds things by what's in them, not just by file name: people, places, text in photos, what was said in videos, and what a photo looks like. The AI work runs on your own PC.

Your files are never changed unless you ask (edit and save, or delete). Ratings, tags, albums and everything the app works out live in its own database.

Features

Browsing

• Timeline of every photo and video, newest first, with day badges and a year/month jump list that follows the scrolling. It stays smooth with 250,000 items.
• Adjustable tiles (slider or Ctrl+mouse wheel), cropped around faces. Video tiles play a preview in place.
• Stars without opening a photo: right-click a photo (or a selection) › Rate › ★ to ★★★★★ or Clear rating, or press 1–5 (0 clears) on the selected photos.
• Filters on every gallery: photos or videos, minimum rating, Live Photos only, utility shots (none / with / only), and people (photos with everyone you pick, chosen from face avatars).
• Utility shots stay out of the timeline and the map: screenshots, and photos of receipts, documents, screens, boxes, tickets, whiteboards, instructions and labels. CLIP finds them on this PC by comparing each photo with descriptions of such records and of memories (people, places, moments). Text read in the photo counts toward a record, and faces count against one. Mark or unmark one in the viewer's details, or several at once from the selection.
• Folders, On this day (this date in past years), Favorites (4★ and up), Live Photos, Albums (drag to reorder), Tags, People, Map, Duplicates, Blurry photos.

Search

• One search box in the title bar (Ctrl+E). Best matches come first. That means photos that look like what you typed ("birthday cake", "dog on the beach") together with photos whose names, folders, tags, people, places, cameras, text or speech contain the words.
• Exact words narrows the results to direct word matches.
• Sort best match / newest / oldest. When sorted by date, group by day, month or year.
• Recent searches and suggestions (people, places, tags) as you type.
• A new search started from the results keeps your sort, grouping and filters. Clear search (or Esc) takes you back to where you started.

Viewer

• Zoom, next and previous, ratings (1–5; Clear or 0 removes them), tags, albums, copy path, show in Explorer, open in OneDrive.
• Details: date, camera, size, location with the place name (your place, the park or restaurant, and the town). Click the name or the coordinates to open the map there.
• Faces: names on hover, face outlines, and a click takes you to that person.
• Text in photo: every line of text in the photo, searchable. Search matches are outlined on the photo, and a find box helps with long documents.
• Similar photos: the photos and videos that look most like this one.
• Delete (Del): to the Recycle Bin, a Live Photo's video included.

Live Photos and video

• Live Photos and motion photos play with Space. Their video can come from:
  • a .MOV stored next to the photo (older iPhone photos);
  • an MP4 embedded in the file (Pixel and Samsung);
  • OneDrive, for newer iPhone Live Photos whose video is only in the cloud.
• Step through frames ( , and . ). Save a frame as a photo (S), or save the motion as an MP4.
• Sharpest frame finds the clearest frame in a Live Photo's video, for when the still came out blurry.
• Video transcripts, made on your PC with Whisper large-v3-turbo on the graphics card:
  • shown beside the video in sentences and paragraphs, with speakers told apart;
  • click a line to jump to it, and the current line is highlighted as it plays;
  • a find box, and every word is searchable.
• Video editor: rotate, trim, remove the sound, and save as MP4.

Editing (photos)

• Rotate, flip, and crop freely or to a fixed shape. Smart crop frames faces and the main subject.
• Light and colour:
  • exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and tint;
  • Auto sets levels, white balance and saturation. It only corrects the colour casts it's confident about, so lamp-lit rooms lose their orange cast while daylight scenes are left alone.
• Save as copy, overwrite the original (the old version goes to the Recycle Bin), or keep the edits in the gallery only.

People, places and the map

• People from OneDrive: the names you gave and the people OneDrive merged, with face positions and avatars.

• Who's this? (People › Who's this?) goes through the people OneDrive found but nobody named, most photos first, with a few of their faces from over the years. Type a name, or pick someone already named to join them. Names and joins go back to OneDrive too, the way OneDrive's own People page sends them: right away, or when OneDrive is connected again (Settings shows anything waiting or refused). Or set someone aside, on this PC only:

  • Known, but don't tag: out of the way until you name them after all;
  • Not someone I know: left out of People.

  People › Show has both, to change your mind. Right-click anyone on People to name, join or set them aside.

• Place names:

  • your places: a centre and a radius you draw on the map, e.g. "Home" or "Grandma's";
  • OneDrive's place names, and the nearest town from GeoNames' offline list;
  • optionally, parks, schools, restaurants, cafés, churches, museums, beaches and more from OpenStreetMap.
  • All of them are searchable ("Manito Park", "restaurant").

• Map with clustered photo markers. The photos in view are listed beside it, and clicking a cluster lists just those.

• Find a place on the map by name: your places, the parks, schools and restaurants your photos were taken at, and towns (GeoNames, biggest first; "Springfield, IL" or "Paris, France" narrows it down), as you type. Anywhere else (an address, a landmark) comes from OpenStreetMap, only when you ask.

Cleaning up

• Duplicates: exact copies, and re-saved or resized versions of the same shot. Extra copies go to the Recycle Bin after you confirm.
• Blurry photos, blurriest first. Turn on Live to see the ones whose video may have a sharper frame.
• Delete from the gallery (Del, the selection bar, or right-click) or the viewer. When deleting several, the next photo is selected, so you can keep weeding.

OneDrive

• Sign in (Settings) to read OneDrive's tags, categories and places, and to open photos on OneDrive.com. This uses Microsoft Graph with read-only access.
• Connect the OneDrive web session (Settings) to play Live Photo videos stored only in OneDrive, and to bring in people, names and faces.
• Files On-Demand placeholders (cloud-only files) are never downloaded just to index them.

Remote access (another computer on your network)

• Open the library from another computer on the same network:

  • the timeline, best-match and exact-word search (sorted and grouped, with suggestions);
  • On this day, Favorites, Live Photos, Videos, People, Tags, Folders, the Map, Albums, Duplicates and Blurry photos;
  • the filters: people, photos or videos, rating, Live Photos only, utility shots;
  • finding a place on the map, as in the app.

• Organize from there too:

  • right-click a photo to rate it or clear its stars;
  • select photos, then rate, add to an album, tag, mark as utility shots or delete them (to the main PC's Recycle Bin);
  • make, rename and delete albums;
  • Who's this?, and naming, joining and setting aside people (names and joins go to OneDrive through the main PC);
  • clear out duplicates.

• Edit from there too:

  • photos: rotate, flip, crop (free or a fixed shape), light and colour, Auto; save as a copy, overwrite the original, or keep the edits in the gallery. The main PC renders the previews and the result, with the app's own renderer, so it looks the same as editing there.
  • Live Photos and videos: find the sharpest frame, step frame by frame, and save a frame as a photo;
  • videos: trim, turn and remove the sound, saved as an MP4 next to the original.

  Everything but rating needs the main PC's permission (Settings › Remote access › Let them change things too).

• The viewer:

  • photos at screen size, with zoom;
  • face and text outlines;
  • videos and Live Photos;
  • details: place, people, tags, albums, text in the photo, what's said in a video, with a find box;
  • similar photos, star ratings, and downloading the original.

• In a browser (any computer, tablet or phone) at https://<computer name>:47813, or in Photo Gallery on the other computer: Another computer at the bottom of the menu. There, the title bar's search box searches the other computer's photos.

• The main PC does the work: searching by description on its graphics card, decoding HEIC for browsers, fetching Live Photo videos from OneDrive. The other computer needs nothing installed but a browser.

• Off until you turn it on (Settings › Remote access, with a passphrase). Other computers can browse, search, view, download and rate; changing or editing anything else is a separate switch. OneDrive's sign-in never leaves the main PC.

• Secured for a home network:

  • it only answers computers on the local network;
  • the connection is encrypted (HTTPS, with a certificate the main PC makes for itself);
  • the passphrase is stored only as a salted PBKDF2 key, and wrong guesses lock the guesser out for longer each time.

  Photo Gallery on the other computer shows the main PC's security code the first time, to compare with the one in its Settings; after that it only accepts that certificate. Browsers warn once that the connection isn't private, because nothing vouches for a certificate the PC made itself.

What stays on your PC and what doesn't

• Indexing, thumbnails, transcripts, text recognition, sharpness, similar photos and description search all run locally. Nothing is uploaded.
• Downloaded once:
  • the AI models: Whisper about 1.6 GB, CLIP about 860 MB, speaker models about 50 MB;
  • GeoNames' town list, about 10 MB.
• Place names from OpenStreetMap are off until you turn them on. When on, they send the rough areas (squares of about 5 × 4 km) where your photos were taken to OpenStreetMap's Overpass service, once each.
• The map shows OpenStreetMap tiles.
• Finding a place on the map searches this PC as you type. Only "Search OpenStreetMap for …" sends what you typed to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service, one search at a time.
• Remote access is off until you turn it on. When on, it serves your library only to computers on your local network that have the passphrase.

Getting started

Requirements

• Windows 10 (19041) or later, or Windows 11, x64.
• The .NET 10 SDK. To run a build without the SDK, install the .NET 10 Runtime and the ASP.NET Core 10 Runtime (the web server behind remote access).
• The WebView2 runtime (built into Windows 11). It's used by the map and the OneDrive connection.
• For iPhone and camera formats: HEIF Image Extensions, HEVC Video Extensions and Raw Image Extension from the Microsoft Store.
• Optional but recommended: a graphics card with current drivers. Transcripts use Vulkan and similar photos use DirectML; without one they run on the CPU, much more slowly.
• Disk space: about 2.5 GB for the AI models, and about 25 KB of thumbnails plus 4 KB of database per photo (for 250,000 photos: about 6 GB of thumbnails and a 1 GB database).

Build and run

Double-click PhotoGallery.bat in the repo root. It builds the app (quick when nothing changed, so it's always the latest after pulling), then starts it. PhotoGallery.bat nobuild starts the last build as it is. It won't start a second copy, or build while one is running.

Or from a terminal:

dotnet build PhotoGallery.slnx
dotnet run --project src/PhotoGallery.App

First run

1. The library starts as %OneDrive%\Pictures. Add or remove folders in Settings › Library folders.
2. The first index of about 250,000 files takes a few minutes. Later starts check for changes in about a second, and files added or changed while the app runs are picked up automatically.
3. The background work starts about a minute after launch and runs newest first. Progress is shown in Settings:
   • thumbnails;
   • text in photos;
   • sharpness;
   • video transcripts;
   • similar-photo matching.
4. Optional, all in Settings:
   • Sign in to OneDrive;
   • Connect the web session, for people and cloud Live Photos;
   • turn on Place names.

Remote access

1. On the computer with the library: Settings › Remote access. Set a passphrase (a few words work well), then turn it on. Settings shows the address and a security code. If Windows asks whether Photo Gallery may use the network, allow it on private networks. The network itself has to be set to Private in Windows.
2. On the other computer, either:
   • open https://<computer name>:47813 in a browser, accept the warning about the certificate, and enter the passphrase; or
   • in Photo Gallery, choose Another computer (bottom of the menu), enter the computer's name and the passphrase, and check that the security code matches. It can remember the passphrase (in Windows' Credential Manager) and open the other computer's photos at start.
3. The main PC has to be on and awake, with Photo Gallery running.
4. To test it from another computer (with a Claude Code agent there), follow docs/remote-testing.md. dotnet run --project tools/PhotoGallery.Cli -- remote-check <computer> checks a host from the command line.

Keyboard

Your data

The database, thumbnail and video caches, AI models, settings and app.log live in %LocalAppData%\PhotoGallery. Deleting that folder resets the app; your photos aren't touched. Caches are never kept inside a OneDrive folder.

Project layout

Credits

Built with the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3), Win2D, SQLite (Microsoft.Data.Sqlite, Dapper) and MetadataExtractor. Also:

• Speech: Whisper.net running OpenAI's Whisper, with Silero VAD.
• Speakers: sherpa-onnx, with pyannote segmentation and NVIDIA NeMo TitaNet.
• Similar photos and utility shots: OpenAI CLIP ViT-L/14, in the ONNX export by Xenova on Hugging Face, run with ONNX Runtime and DirectML.
• Text in photos: Windows' built-in OCR.
• Map: Leaflet and Leaflet.markercluster, with map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.
• Place names: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), through the Overpass API. Towns from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).

Each component and model keeps its own license; see their projects.