Skip to content

Offline face search

Offline Face Search for Photos and Videos

SnapByFace finds a person across your local photo and video libraries without uploading anything. The face models ship inside the app, so recognition and search work with the network unplugged.

Download SnapByFace Read the docs

What it is

What is offline face search?

Offline face search means every step — detecting faces, turning them into numeric embeddings, and comparing them against a reference photo — happens on your own machine. No cloud service receives your photos, your videos, or the face data derived from them.

SnapByFace is a desktop app for Windows and macOS. You give it one reference photo per person and point it at the folders where your media already lives. It builds a private index on your computer and answers searches against that index — without sending a single image anywhere.

How it works

Three steps, entirely on your computer

1

Add reference photos

One clear photo per person, named after them — the file name becomes the person's name in results. Sub-folders are scanned recursively.

2

Scan your folders

Point SnapByFace at your media folders. It detects faces, stores 512-dimension embeddings locally, and indexes photos and sampled video frames alike. Long scans can be paused and resumed.

3

Search and export

Pick a person, get matches ranked by similarity score, and export the hits to any folder. Everything already found stays browsable offline.

Why local

What local processing means in practice

Your media never leaves the machine

Photos, videos, the face index and the extracted embeddings stay in a local folder in your user directory. There is no cloud library and nothing to sync.

No network needed after install

The face models are bundled in the installer, so nothing is downloaded at runtime. Search works with the cable unplugged.

The one exception, stated plainly

An optional device-statistics ping (machine code, app version, OS, language, activation state) is sent at most once per 24 hours to count installations. It carries no media data and can be switched off in Settings.

No account, no sign-up

SnapByFace runs without an account or an email address. The free trial runs a full local search on your own folders before you decide to pay.

Offline face search: frequently asked questions

Does offline face search need an internet connection?
No. Once SnapByFace is installed, detection and search run with the network unplugged. The only outbound request is the optional statistics ping described above, which you can disable.
Is offline face recognition as good as cloud face recognition?
SnapByFace uses the same core technique as cloud services — neural face embeddings compared by cosine similarity. Running locally does not change the math; what changes is that your media is never uploaded and no per-search fee accrues. You also get direct control: the similarity threshold is adjustable, so you decide the trade-off between strict and loose matching.
Where is my data stored?
In a local folder in your user directory (~/.snapbyface/ on macOS, %USERPROFILE%\.snapbyface on Windows): the index, the face embeddings, your settings and logs. Delete the folder and everything is gone.
Which formats does it support?
Photos: JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, WebP and HEIC/HEIF. Video: MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, M4V, WebM and TS. Camera RAW files are not supported.

Run your first offline search

Download SnapByFace, add one reference photo, and search a folder you already have. The trial runs a full local search — no account, no upload.

Download SnapByFace Read the docs