Lap is a local-first desktop photo manager designed for browsing, organising and managing large personal media libraries without requiring a cloud service.
It works directly with existing folders rather than forcing photographs into a proprietary library structure. Multiple libraries are supported, with timeline, folder, location, camera, lens, tag, rating, subject and face filters. Smart Albums provide saved rule-based views, while collections let files be grouped without moving or duplicating the originals.
Lap includes tools for finding duplicate and visually similar photographs, comparing images in a four-pane viewer, and culling large collections. It recognises Apple Live Photos and Android Motion Photos and can keep RAW files paired with matching JPEG or HEIC companions.
Basic editing includes cropping, rotation, resizing and image adjustments. There is broad support for photographic, RAW and video formats, while local AI facilities provide text-based image search, similarity matching, automatic subjects and face clustering. These operations run locally rather than uploading photographs to an external service.
Lap uses SQLite for its catalogue and is built with Tauri, Rust and Vue.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Local-first, folder-based photo management.
- Timeline, folder, location and metadata browsing.
- Smart Albums and collections.
- Duplicate and similar-photo detection.
- Local image search and face clustering.
- Four-pane image comparison.
- Basic image editing facilities.
- Apple Live Photo and Android Motion Photo support.
- RAW and video format support.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/julyx10/lap
Support:
Developer: julyx10
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Lap is written in Rust with a Vue frontend. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Photo Management Software | |
|---|---|
| digiKam | Image organiser and editor using KDE |
| darktable | Photography workflow application and raw developer |
| TagStudio | Tag-based photo and file organization program |
| gThumb | Image viewer and organizer for the GNOME desktop environment |
| Shotwell | Personal photo management |
| KPhotoAlbum | Tool for indexing, searching and viewing images for KDE |
| Pix | Image viewer and browser utility which is based on gThumb |
| Tropy | Explore your research photos |
| Rapid Photo Downloader | Photo and video downloader |
| Allusion-rafauc | Fork of Allusion |
| Allusion | Organize your visual library |
| GNOME Photos | Access, organize and share your photos on GNOME |
| Snu Photo Manager | Feature-rich photo manager |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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