Guides
How to find the person you are looking for across tens of thousands of photos and hours of video — without uploading any of it anywhere.
-
Google Photos Alternative That Doesn't Upload Your Photos
Google Photos groups people beautifully — as long as it keeps a copy of everything. Here is what you actually give up by going local, what you get back, and how the person search compares.
2026-09-28 4 min read Read
- comparison
- privacy
- google photos
-
Local Face Search vs Cloud Face APIs: When Offline Wins
Cloud face APIs are better at scale and worse at privacy. A local desktop index is the opposite. Here is an honest comparison — cost, accuracy, speed and what actually happens to your photos.
2026-09-28 4 min read Read
- privacy
- comparison
- offline
-
PhotoPrism and immich vs SnapByFace: Self-Hosted vs a Local Desktop Index
Self-hosting keeps your photos on your own hardware and so does a desktop index — but one of them needs a server. A comparison of PhotoPrism, immich and SnapByFace, and when each is the right shape.
2026-09-28 4 min read Read
- comparison
- self-hosted
- privacy
-
Apple Photos vs SnapByFace: When the Free People Album Isn't Enough
Apple Photos builds a People album for free and never uploads your faces. Here is where it stops — and what you actually gain by adding a separate local index.
2026-09-28 5 min read Read
- comparison
- macos
- apple photos
-
Excire Foto vs SnapByFace: Two Buy-Once Desktop Tools, Different Jobs
Both are one-time-purchase desktop apps that index photos locally. One is a photo manager that also finds faces; the other only finds people — including in video.
2026-09-28 4 min read Read
- comparison
- windows
- photo management
-
digiKam vs SnapByFace: Full Photo Management vs Purpose-Built Face Search
digiKam is a free, open-source photo manager that happens to do faces. SnapByFace only does faces. Which one you want depends on whether you need a DAM or an answer.
2026-09-28 4 min read Read
- comparison
- open source
- photo management
-
How to Organise a Photo Library by Person — Without Retagging Everything
Organising tens of thousands of photos by person fails when it depends on manual tagging. Build a person library from one photo per person and let the index do the grouping instead.
2026-09-26 3 min read Read
- photo organisation
- person libraries
- workflow
-
How to Find a Person in Your Videos Without Uploading Them
Video face search works by sampling frames, matching them against a reference photo, and merging hits into time ranges. Here is how to find the moment someone appears — with nothing leaving your computer.
2026-09-24 4 min read Read
- video search
- privacy
- how it works
-
How to Find Every Photo of One Person in a Large Library
Finding every photo of one person comes down to three things: one good reference photo, a single pass over your folders, and knowing how to read a similarity score. Here is the workflow that holds up at 50,000 photos.
2026-09-22 4 min read Read
- photo search
- large libraries
- getting started