# Phokus A local-first desktop media library for browsing, filtering, and curating image and video folders. ## Features ### Library - Add and remove media folders; background indexing with live progress - **Live file tracking** — a filesystem watcher keeps the library in sync as files are added, changed, or removed; renames and moves are handled in place, preserving thumbnails and embeddings - Browse all media or filter by folder, type (image/video), favorites, or star rating - Sort by date added, date taken (EXIF), name, size, rating, or duration - Grid density controls (compact / comfortable / detail) - Desktop notifications, batched per folder, with per-folder mute and a global pause ### Search & discovery - **Filename search**, **semantic search** (`/s query`), and **tag search** (`/t tag`) - **Similar image search** — find visually similar media by image or a selected region - **Explore view** — visual cluster map and tag cloud for browsing by theme - **Timeline view** — media grouped chronologically by capture date (EXIF) - **Duplicate finder** — three-phase exact-duplicate scan (size → sample hash → full hash) with live progress and bulk delete - Explore, Timeline, and Duplicates are folder-scopable directly from their headers — no need to bounce through the sidebar ### Viewing & curation - Lightbox with keyboard navigation, zoom, inline tag editing, and rating controls - **Custom video player** — immersive edge-to-edge playback with scrubbing, volume, playback speed, loop, and fullscreen; auto-hiding controls and full keyboard support - **AI tagging** via WD tagger (ONNX, CPU/DirectML) with confidence threshold, batch size, and per-folder queue targeting ### Maintenance - Database compaction and orphaned-thumbnail cleanup from Settings, with live size/reclaimable stats - Per-folder pausing of background work (thumbnails, metadata, embeddings, tagging) ## Supported formats | Images | Videos | |--------|--------| | jpg, jpeg, png, gif, bmp | mp4, mov, m4v | | tiff, tif, webp, avif | webm | ## Installation Phokus is a **Windows desktop app**. Download the latest installer from the [Releases page](https://github.com/JezzWTF/phokus/releases/latest) and run it. **Requirements:** Windows 10 or 11. The installer will fetch the WebView2 runtime automatically if it isn't already present (it ships with Windows 11). ### A note on the unsigned build Phokus 0.1.0 installers are **not code-signed**. Code-signing certificates are an ongoing expense that's hard to justify for an unfunded open-source project, so signing is on the roadmap rather than in place today. In practice this means Windows SmartScreen will show a blue **"Windows protected your PC"** warning the first time you run the installer. To proceed: click **More info → Run anyway**. If a release publishes a SHA-256 checksum, you can verify the download against it first. ### First run On first launch Phokus downloads a few tools and models — all one-time, and all processed on your machine: - **FFmpeg** (~tens of MB) for video thumbnails and metadata — downloaded in the background; the guided first-run tour shows progress. - **WD tagger model** (~1.3 GB) — **optional**, only if you enable AI tagging. - **CLIP embedding model** (~580 MB) — downloaded automatically the first time visual embeddings run (powers semantic search and similar images). ## Privacy & local-first Phokus is local-first by design. **Your media and everything derived from it — thumbnails, embeddings, tags, ratings — never leave your machine.** There is no account, no telemetry, and no cloud sync. The only network activity is: - **One-time tool/model downloads** on first use (FFmpeg, the CLIP and WD models, and the ONNX runtime), fetched from their official sources (FFmpeg builds, Hugging Face, NuGet). These pull *tools to your machine* — none of your images are uploaded. - **Update checks** against the GitHub Releases page, so the app can offer new versions. This can be ignored if you never update. Everything Phokus stores lives in its app-data directory (`gallery.db`, `thumbnails/`, `models/`, `settings/`). Removing that directory resets the app completely; your original media folders are never modified. ## Stack - Tauri 2 + Rust backend - React 19 + TypeScript + Zustand - SQLite + `sqlite-vec` (vector search) + HNSW index - ONNX Runtime (`ort`) for AI tagging - Candle (Rust ML) for CLIP visual embeddings - mozjpeg for fast scaled JPEG decoding - FFmpeg sidecar for video thumbnails and metadata - Vite + Tailwind CSS v4 ## Development **Prerequisites:** Node.js 20+, pnpm, Rust toolchain, Tauri system prerequisites for Windows. ```bash pnpm install # Run with hot-reload (frontend + Rust) pnpm dev:app # Frontend only pnpm dev:vite # Production build (CPU) pnpm build:app:cpu # Production build (CUDA / GPU-accelerated) pnpm build:app:cuda # Type-check the frontend pnpm build:vite ``` ## How it works 1. Add a folder from the sidebar — the Rust indexer walks it recursively. 2. Supported files are written to SQLite with metadata (path, dimensions, media type, EXIF capture date, etc.). 3. Background workers process the queue as a strict priority pipeline — thumbnails first, then video metadata, then visual embeddings, then AI tags — so each stage runs at full speed instead of competing for CPU, disk, and the database. 4. Progress events stream back to the UI while the gallery updates incrementally. 5. A filesystem watcher picks up later changes (new files, edits, deletions, renames) and keeps the index current without rescans. 6. Embeddings power semantic search and the similar-images feature via an HNSW index.