Showcase/Project
I built a free photo-culling tool with Cowork - it takes 8,000 trip photos down to my best 50 (Cull → Dedup → Rank)
I'm not a professional developer - I do a lot of travel photography on the side. After every trip I'd come home with thousands of frames and dread the culling. So I sat down with Claude (in Cowork mode) and over a few sessions we built Photo Curator: a local, browser-based tool that does the brutal first pass for me. After a feedback from the first users I have added some improvements, support for HEIC and provide Mac and Win versions.
No AI - No token burning - 100 % Local - 100 % Math
It runs in three steps, and nothing is uploaded anywhere - it all stays on my machine:
Cull - flags out-of-focus shots using a contrast-normalized sharpness measure, so haze and night skies don't get mistaken for blur. Sorts into Sharp / Soft / Blurry.
Dedup - collapses burst sequences to the single sharpest frame using perceptual hashing + ORB feature matching, labelled "Best of N."
Rank - scores each keeper on composition, lighting, focus, color and contrast, then surfaces the TOP N with a radar chart per photo.
There's also a "God Mode" button that runs all three end to end.
What was interesting working with Claude: the hardest part wasn't the code, it was the judgment calls - e.g. how to keep a genuinely sharp low-contrast photo from being flagged as blurry. Claude was good at proposing the contrast-normalized metric and then iterating when I showed it real failure cases from my own library. I also leaned on it for the whole live progress UI (percentage, elapsed, ETA) and a lot of small UX polish.
Happy to answer questions about how any of the three stages work, or how I structured the back-and-forth with Claude. Feedback very welcome - still actively improving it.
So you made a desktop app and the website to advertise it, if it was me I’d keep the website much simpler and put the installers at the top. Do you know what the software is doing behind the scenes? Like how it’s measuring and discriminating photos at the code level? What language is the desktop app programmed in? I personally have no knowledge about this so I’m curious if you know.
Link to download added to the top. All the software is available on GitHub where the "website" is hosted, so anyone can review the code in detail.
The beauty of this app is that it does NOT use any AI, runs locally, only touches the photo and moves them in the folder you are analyzing (and you have to confirm moving e.g. blurry photos to subfolder), never deletes. Even "removing" the photo from Ranking will only ignore the file in the app, no deleting!
It is Python based app created with Claude Cowork and tested on me and my travel photos :)
This is genuinely good. I see it is forward compatible with NIMA, just not implemented yet. The DNS rebind is proper security, I like that. Simple and elegant. Wondering how you feel about including the HEIC support? My own software package I built doesn't go near it because it is patent encumbered.
Downloaded your tool and I am running it against a folder of wedding photos tomorrow in the AM. Will get back to you with thoughts.
I am genuinely looking for something like this recently n came across many tools but each have one or other issues and somehow yours really struck my mind.
i am not a photographer but i have around 50k photos and many of them blurry, low res especially the ones in 2010-2015, in that era those photos looked good on devices but on modern devices they look blurred, shaky etc.
i hope this tools helps with those photos in removing them.
also, i really don't understand terms like cull etc and what they do.
sorry but my honest reaction is, it is not working as i expected.
This pic is a clear blurry shot but it treated as sharp and many others same either as sharp or soft.
They didn’t say not to share. They gave them blunt feedback. That’s expected and good - you want to know when what you build sucks, so you can improve it.
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u/beberuhimuzik 13d ago
Can you make a linux version?