Show HN: Built a desktop app to organize photos locally with duplicate detection
12 comments
·July 10, 2025mac-monet
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?
theshrike79
Apple tried this, but The Internet got mad again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584856
mcvanhassel
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!
nikolayasdf123
$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.
delusional
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...
smt88
How does it detect duplicates? Hashing or something else?
aa-jv
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.
Brajeshwar
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.
nikolayasdf123
+1. cannot scroll in Firefox
Amwam
> 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
nguyenkien
> 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.
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?