Photo library for Windows · runs on your own graphics card

Every photo you own, searchable, on your own PC.

Localroll reads the folders you already have: your Pictures folder, phone backups, that Amazon Photos or iCloud export you downloaded once and never opened. It turns them into a library you can search by describing what's in the picture. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account.

Download for Windows Early build · Windows 10/11 · NVIDIA GPU recommended
Why it exists

I had 98,000 photos and no way to find the good ones.

They were spread across an Amazon Photos backup, two iCloud exports and a pile of phone dumps going back years. Somewhere in there were the pictures I actually cared about, buried under screenshots of text messages, memes people sent me, and four hundred near-identical shots of the same sunset.

The cloud services will happily sort that for you, as long as you keep paying them and keep handing them your photos. I didn't want either. So I built this. It ran through all 98,000 files on one gaming PC in an evening, and now I can type "dog at the beach" and get the dog at the beach.

Sorting

Memes go in the meme pile.

A camera roll is maybe a third photos. The rest is screenshots of conversations, memes from the group chat, product pictures you saved to think about later, and a picture of your insurance card. Photo apps treat all of it as memories.

Localroll separates them. It reads the camera data in the file, looks at the filename, and asks the image model what kind of picture it's looking at. The timeline ends up being the trip, not the group chat. The memes are still there, in their own bin, when you want them.

  • Photostaken with a camera or phone
    61,204
  • Videosany length, any phone
    15,498
  • Screenshotsapps, texts, maps, games
    10,225
  • Memescaption text over a picture
    7,409
  • Downloadssaved from the web, product shots, wallpapers
    3,798
  • Documentsreceipts, IDs, whiteboards, scans
    2,407
Example breakdown of a 100,000-file library.
People

Corrections that stick.

Localroll finds faces and groups them into people. You name a group once and every photo of that person is a click away. When it gets one wrong, you move the face to the right person and it takes the hint: not just for that photo, but for what that person looks like, so the next batch comes in right.

Two groups that turned out to be the same person? Merge them. Two people it keeps confusing? Tell it once and it stops. Blurry faces in the background never start a new person on their own; they can only join someone it already knows well.

Maya
1,204 photos
Dad
688 photos
Sam
412 photos
Same as Sam?
37 photos · merge
When two groups look like the same person, it asks instead of guessing.
The rest

The boring parts, handled.

  • Dates that are actually right. It reads the date the photo was taken from the file, then from Google Takeout's sidecar files, then from the filename, and only falls back to the file's modified date when there's nothing else.
  • Duplicates. Exact copies, and near-copies like the same shot exported at three sizes or re-saved by WhatsApp. Grouped together so you can pick one.
  • iPhone files. HEIC photos and MOV clips from iCloud exports open like anything else.
  • Videos play in the app. Thumbnails, durations, playback, search. Not a folder of icons.
  • Big libraries. It was built against 100,000 files. Indexing runs in the background and you can stop it, restart your PC, and pick up where it left off.

What stays on your computer: all of it.

This isn't a privacy feature bolted onto a cloud product. There is no cloud. The app is a program on your PC that reads your folders and keeps its notes in a file next to itself.

No uploads, no account

The app only talks to itself, on 127.0.0.1. There's nothing to sign up for. Unplug the network and everything still works.

The AI runs on your GPU

The image and face models are downloaded once, about a gigabyte, and run on your own graphics card. No API, no credits, no per-photo fee, ever.

Your files are never touched

Localroll reads. It doesn't move, rename, re-encode or edit anything. Delete the app's folder and every trace of it is gone; your photos are exactly where they were.

Download

Runs on the PC you already have.

System
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Graphics
NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB or more recommended. It runs without one, but indexing is many times slower.
Disk
About 2 GB for the app and models, plus roughly 30 MB of thumbnails per 1,000 photos.
Sources
Any folder. Pictures, phone backups, extracted Amazon Photos, iCloud and Google Takeout exports.
Download Localroll for Windows Early build. Expect rough edges; nothing it does can damage your photos.
Questions
How long does indexing take?

It depends on the graphics card and on how many videos you have. A library of about 100,000 photos and videos took one evening on a recent NVIDIA card. You can use the app while it works, and it resumes if you stop it or restart the PC.

What do I point it at?

Folders. Your Pictures folder, a phone backup, or the folder you get when you extract an Amazon Photos, iCloud or Google Takeout download. Add as many as you like. It skips files under 1 KB and anything that isn't a photo or video.

Does the search send my photos anywhere?

No. Your words and your photos are compared on your own graphics card. The app has no network features at all beyond the one-time model download.

What if it puts a photo in the wrong category, or names the wrong person?

Fix it in the app. Face corrections teach it. It's software looking at pictures; it will get some wrong, and the point is that fixing them is fast.

Mac or Linux?

Not yet. It's Windows only for now.