Find and organize hundreds of thousands of family photos locally without cloud uploads
Search for people or scenes in your photos using text and clean up duplicate files without an internet connection. Lap is an open-source desktop app that manages photos and videos while keeping your existing folder structure intact. Because your images stay on your local disk rather than being uploaded to a cloud server, it suits users who prioritize privacy.
Management that leaves folders untouched
Lap does not import photos into a separate database but references your existing folders directly. Original files always remain in their current location, while Lap creates an index of these files to enable fast navigation. You can filter flexibly based on photo date, camera, lens, location, tags, ratings, and face information. Smart albums allow you to save rule-based views, and collections and tags let you group selected files for management without moving or duplicating them. This is a significant advantage for users who want to organize their photos while maintaining their current folder structure.
Local AI search and face recognition
Searching photo content with text prompts or finding images similar to a specific photo is all processed on your computer. You can group photos by person using face clustering, and multilingual search is available in more than 50 languages. These AI features do not rely on cloud servers, so they work without an internet connection. Photos and videos with geotags are displayed as clusters in an interactive map view according to the current filter, supporting location-based exploration. RAW files and JPEG/HEIC files are displayed as a single item, ensuring they stay together during file operations.
Optimization for large libraries and format support
It supports more than 60 photo, RAW, and video formats, and H.264 video playback is supported on all platforms. On macOS, HEVC/H.265 and VP9 are natively supported, while on Linux, videos are played using system GStreamer plugins. Automatic compatibility handling is applied when native playback is not possible. RAW thumbnails and previews can be configured to use RAW rendering or the preview embedded in the camera. You can adjust thumbnail size up to 1024px and customize grid size and corners.
Data storage location and the importance of backups
Lap stores collections, tags, comments, favorites, ratings, culling status, smart album rules, AI search data, face data, and thumbnails in a local database. This information is not written to EXIF, IPTC, or XMP sidecars, so it does not move with files when you copy them or transfer them to other apps. Therefore, if you rename, move, replace, or copy files outside of Lap, the organization information stored in Lap may break. If you rely on this information, it is safer to perform file operations within Lap, and you should back up the database and configuration files along with your photos. Deleting the database does not delete the original media files, but the local organization information and index will be lost.
Installation and system requirements
It is available on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and you can download packages for each platform or install via Homebrew. The Windows version is unsigned, so if SmartScreen blocks it, you must select 'Keep'. On Linux, .deb files for Debian-based distributions and AppImage files are provided. To build from source, you need Node.js 20 or higher, pnpm, and Rust stable. macOS and Linux require additional system dependencies, and installing GStreamer plugins is recommended for video playback on Linux. It is distributed under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and can be used for free without subscriptions or a forced ecosystem.
