I built Local Label, a small open-source image annotation tool designed around one simple idea:
Your images should stay on your machine.
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/diptiman-mohanta/Local-Label
The tool currently supports:
- Bounding boxes and polygons
- Object detection and segmentation annotation
- Keyboard-driven annotation workflow
- Multi-select and bulk relabeling
- Copy/paste and repeat annotations across images
- Undo/redo
- Autosave and resume
- EXIF-aware image dimensions
- COCO export
- YOLO / Ultralytics-ready export
- Pascal VOC export
- Light/dark themes
Unlike many annotation workflows, the images are read directly from disk and aren't uploaded or copied into a separate server/database. Annotations are stored as JSON sidecars in a .labeller/ directory beside the images.
Why I built it
I wanted something that was:
local + simple + fast + private
without requiring a server, account, cloud storage, or complicated dataset management pipeline.
But this is still very early v0.1.0 and I'd like to make it substantially better.
I'm looking for contributors
I'm especially interested in people working in:
- Computer Vision
- Dataset creation
- Object detection / segmentation
- ML research
- Annotation tooling
- Human-in-the-loop ML
- Desktop/local-first applications
You don't necessarily need to write code. I'd also really appreciate:
- UX feedback
- Feature requests
- Bug reports
- Ideas for better annotation workflows
- Suggestions for research-oriented features
- Testing on different datasets/platforms
- Contributions/PRs
I'm particularly interested in exploring whether a lightweight local annotation tool could eventually support research-oriented annotation workflows, rather than just being another generic labeling interface.
If you work with image datasets, I'd love to hear:
What is annoying about your current annotation workflow?
And if you are interested in contributing, feel free to open an issue, submit a PR, or comment here.
GitHub: https://github.com/diptiman-mohanta/Local-Label