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About Lap

A private, local-first photo manager for people who want control over their memories.

Lap is a private, local-first photo manager for people who want control over their memories. It started from a simple frustration: cloud photo services want your entire photo history on their servers, with a subscription attached.

Lap takes the opposite approach. It works directly with the folders already on your computer, keeps every photo local, and runs its AI features on your own hardware. It's free and open source under GPL-3.0, so the project can never be bought, shut down, or turned into a subscription service.

The project is open to contributors. If you'd like to help, head to GitHub.

What Lap is not

Lap is not a cloud service, and it is not a subscription. There is no account, no upload and no locked tier; every feature is in the free build. It also does not import your photos into a private database — it reads the folders you already have.

How it is made

Lap is a desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux, built with Tauri, Rust and Vue and released under GPL-3.0. It runs offline and keeps its catalog in a local SQLite database, using ONNX Runtime, CLIP and InsightFace for search and face features, and LibRaw, libheif and FFmpeg for decoding and video. Because the code is public, anyone can check how it handles files and data.

Local first, in practice

  • Your photos stay in the folders you already use.
  • Search, faces and tags run on your own hardware.
  • No account, no upload, no subscription.
  • The catalog is a local database you can move or back up.

That combination is the whole idea: a photo manager that stays out of the way, keeps working offline, and leaves your library in a state any other app can read.

Questions and contributions are welcome. Write to us via contact, read how the project is licensed on the open source page, or see the privacy policy for details on data handling.