lap

Project Overview

Lap is an open-source, local-first photo manager for browsing family albums, finding old photos quickly, and managing large personal media libraries offline. It is a privacy-focused alternative to cloud photo services: no forced upload, local AI search, folder-first workflow, and free to use.

Key Features

• Flexible library browsing with timeline, folder, location, camera, lens, tag, favorite, rating, subject, and face filters
• Smart Albums save rule-based views
• Collections: Organize files into flexible collections without moving or duplicating originals
• Local AI search for text prompts, visual similarity, subjects, face clustering, and multilingual search in 50+ languages
• Apple Live Photos support
• RAW + JPEG/HEIC pairs support

Target Audience

• Users with large personal photo libraries
• Privacy-conscious users who don't want to upload photos to the cloud
• Users who need offline photo management solutions

Quick Start

1. Download the package for your platform from Releases
2. macOS: brew tap julyx10/lap && brew install --cask lap
3. Install and launch Lap
4. Start browsing and managing your photo library

Core Advantages

• Local-first by design, photos stay on your own disk
• No library lock-in, work directly with existing folders
• Private AI tools running locally
• Optimized for large collections with 100k+ files
• Open-source and free, no subscription

System Requirements

• OS: macOS, Windows 10/11, Linux (Debian-based)
• Architectures: Apple Silicon, x64, ARM64