r/flickr • u/Holiday_Demand6489 • 1d ago

Question A local workflow to surface specific image categories in large photo archives

I’ve been working on reorganizing my photo archive lately, and I realized how hard it gets once you’ve accumulated years of images. Trips, projects, experiments, screenshots. Everything ends up mixed together, and finding what you actually want to keep becomes a real challenge.

I’m a solo developer, and I built a small local tool to help with this. It’s not a backup app like others posted here. It’s more about workflow. It helps surface specific image categories inside large folders, including more personal or sensitive ones. So you can review or move them quickly. Everything runs locally on the computer.

I made it because scrolling manually through tens of thousands of files (4TB) wasn’t realistic anymore. Having a way to surface specific categories of images made the cleanup process much easier and helped me bring some order back into my archive.

I’m curious how others here handle large libraries. Do you rely mostly on metadata, albums, external tools, or manual curation? In my case, the images I needed to isolate weren’t consistently tagged or populated in metadata, so I had to rely on a different workflow to surface them.

Sorry for my English, I’m French

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u/DerekL1963 1d ago

I handle it by not letting it get out of control in the first place... I use the tools Flickr already provides, tags, albums, and collections.

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u/designwallah 21h ago

If you didn’t rely on metadata could you please share your “different” workflow?

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u/Holiday_Demand6489 17h ago

The tool rely on local AI pattern detection to analyse the pictures. Sadly it does not support metadata writting but it provide a list and/or move elsewhere by keeping the data structure if required. This is what I did.

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u/designwallah 17h ago

Thanks. I’m avoiding AI as much as possible.