The Family Photo Library

Two decades of pictures and videos had piled up across an old editing catalog, phones and backup drives. We moved all of it onto our own storage at home, checked every file as it went, cleared out the duplicates, and taught it to understand plain questions like "the kids at the beach" or "birthday parties in 2015". All the recognition and captioning runs on our own computer, so the photos never leave the house.

The test that mattered most was a simple one: could someone type a half-remembered moment and get the right picture back? Most days, now, it can.

Highlights

• Well over a hundred thousand photos and videos, every file checked bit for bit as it moved
• Search by who, when, where and what's happening, in ordinary words
• Captions and photo events written by models running locally, not in the cloud
• Duplicates set aside for review, never deleted by a script
• Ask the house assistant for a photo and it sends one back