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!

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?

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

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 need something like this for Linux.

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

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.

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

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.