Technical write-ups and field notes on curation, computer vision, and what it actually takes to make sense of a photographic body of work.
ComparisonsPhotoPrism is the best self-hosted photo library you can run: open source, browser-based, AI labels, face recognition, your hardware, your rules. It solves ownership beautifully. An honest look at why that still leaves the harder problem untouched.
ComparisonsdigiKam is free, open source, cross-platform, and after twenty years it's probably the most capable photo database a photographer can install without paying anything. So why would you add Photoreka? An honest comparison of what tags can do — and where they stop.
Inside PhotorekaWe wanted to talk to an entire catalog—not just a single photo—and we couldn't find anything that could do it. That's how ChatLab was born: an agent built on frontier models that knows your archive, actually sees your photos, and orchestrates the rest of Photoreka's tools.
ComparisonsPeakto is one of the most interesting AI photo organizers of the last few years — and it's Mac-only, subscription-priced. An honest comparison for photographers who want AI-powered organization and curation on Windows, Linux, or simply without a monthly fee.
Curation PhilosophyGrids and folders show you fifty photos at a time, ordered by filename. Your catalog isn't a list — it has shape, density, and gaps that no scrollbar can reveal. On why nothing else renders an entire archive as a navigable space, and what happens when you finally see your work from the outside.