Selects

Cull thousands of travel photos down to your keepers — locally, privately, on your own machine.

Point it at a folder of photos and videos. It indexes, scores, clusters, and groups them into day-by-day stories, surfaces the best shots, and gets out of your way. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

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Why Selects

I built Selects for the post-trip mess: 3,000 photos, five versions of the same mountain, ten blurry food shots, and one frame where everyone actually has their eyes open.

The app is meant to do the boring first pass locally, then leave the final taste call to you.

Private by design	All inference runs locally. No cloud, no account, no upload.
More than EXIF sorting	Semantic search, face grouping, aesthetic scoring, eyes-open burst picking.
Photos and video	Frame scoring, dead-footage detection, highlight segments.
Fast to cull	Keyboard-first review, side-by-side compare, learns your taste.
Yours to extend	Clean FastAPI backend + React UI + a scriptable CLI.

The only network call is an optional place-name lookup for geotagged shots.

Features

Feature	What it does
Discovery search	Natural-language + tag search over on-device SigLIP embeddings
Auto tagging	Zero-shot + RAM++ open-vocabulary labels
People	ArcFace embeddings clustered into named "Person" identities
Face-aware culling	Eyes-open / head-pose scoring picks the best frame in a burst
Stories	GPS + time clustering into day-by-day, place-by-place trips
Aesthetic curation	AP25 + NIMA scoring with percentile "best-of" gating
Duplicate finder	Exact + near-duplicate report with reclaimable-storage summary
Keyboard culling	Arrow-key review, undo, 100% zoom, synced-zoom compare
Taste learning	A local model that nudges scoring toward your keep/reject history
Export	Copy/zip keepers or write XMP star ratings to Lightroom/darktable
Trip recap	A self-contained shareable HTML keepsake per trip
Video culling	Frame sampling, quality scoring, dead-footage flags, highlights
Watch folder	Point it at your camera dump; new files index automatically

Install

Desktop app (recommended) — download the bundle for your OS from Releases and run it. No Python required; it downloads its AI models on first launch.

Via pip (Python 3.11+):

pip install selects          # app + web GUI + CLI
pip install "selects[ml]"    # add the on-device AI (torch, insightface, …)
selects serve                # open the web UI
selects index /path/to/trip  # or run headless from the CLI

RAM++ tagging installs separately (no PyPI release): pip install git+https://github.com/xinyu1205/recognize-anything.git

Platform support

Builds are CPU-only today — universal, just slower on the ML stages. selects doctor reports detected hardware; GPU acceleration is on the roadmap.

Platform	CPU today	GPU (planned)
Windows (x64)	✓	NVIDIA / CUDA
macOS (Apple Silicon)	✓	Metal (MPS) + CoreML
macOS (Intel)	✓	—
Linux (x64)	✓	NVIDIA / CUDA
AMD / Intel GPUs	✓ (as CPU)	ONNX Runtime DirectML / ROCm

Architecture

API-first: a FastAPI backend does all the work; every client — web UI, CLI, future mobile — is just another consumer of the same /api surface. State lives in a per-library SQLite DB inside the photo folder (<folder>/.selects/), so a library is self-contained and portable.

flowchart TD
    Clients["Web UI · CLI · Mobile (planned)"]
    API["FastAPI + WebSocket API"]
    Pipeline["Pipeline orchestrator"]
    Classical["Classical scoring<br/>(blur, exposure, faces)"]
    ML["ML stages<br/>(SigLIP, ArcFace, RAM++, VLM)"]
    Files[("Photos & videos<br/>local disk")]
    DB[("Per-library SQLite<br/>&lt;folder&gt;/.selects/")]

    Clients --> API
    API --> Pipeline
    API --> DB
    Pipeline --> Classical
    Pipeline --> ML
    Pipeline --> Files
    Pipeline --> DB

Loading

Each stage reads/writes <folder>/.selects/index.db and is independently re-runnable via selects index <folder> --pass <stage>:

#	Stage	Does
1	index	walk & hash files, decode previews/thumbnails, read EXIF/GPS
2	classical	blur / exposure / clipped-highlight / face scoring; auto-reject gate
3	embed	SigLIP-SO400M image embeddings + CLIP-IQA aesthetic score
4	tag	zero-shot tagging via SigLIP text-prompt similarity
5	ram_tag	RAM++ open-vocabulary tagging
6	smart_tag	HDBSCAN clustering over embeddings + VLM cluster names
7	thematic / date	rule-driven location and day clustering from GPS/time
8	face_embed	ArcFace embeddings for detected faces
9	moment	collapse near-duplicate/burst photos into one best pick
10	story	build day/place stories from moments, tags, and locations

Aesthetic curation combines AP25 + NIMA with configurable per-scope and library-wide percentile thresholds (see Configuration).

Roadmap

Shipped (v0.1)

• Discovery search, tagging, people, face-aware culling
• Stories, aesthetic curation, duplicate finder
• Keyboard culling + compare, taste learning
• Export (copy/zip + XMP), trip recap, video culling, watch folder
• CPU desktop builds for Windows, macOS, Linux + PyPI package

Planned

• GPU acceleration — Apple Silicon (MPS/CoreML) & NVIDIA (CUDA) first, AMD (DirectML/ROCm) later
• Android companion — LAN remote that drives the desktop backend from your phone
• Android standalone — on-device culling for small libraries (no desktop needed)
• Cursor-based pagination, auto-tuned aesthetic/burst thresholds, iOS parity

Quickstart (from source)

Requires Python 3.11+ and Node 18+.

pip install -e ".[ml]"        # ML stack (torch, transformers, insightface, …); omit [ml] for classical-only
selects serve /path/to/photos # backend + web UI (indexes in the background)

cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev   # hot-reloading UI (separate terminal)

selects serve opens the web UI (--no-browser to skip) and indexes in the background (--no-background to skip). With the frontend built once (npm run build), the backend serves the UI same-origin — no npm run dev needed. With no folder argument it opens the active library, or onboarding if none exists. Drive stages directly with selects index <folder> [--pass <stage>] and check hardware with selects doctor.

Configuration

Per-folder via pydantic-settings; override any field with a SELECTS_-prefixed env var (or .env), e.g. SELECTS_WEB_PORT=9000. See selects/config.py.

Field	Default	Notes
web_port	8765	Web UI/API port
web_host	127.0.0.1	Bind host
burst_window_seconds	3	Time window for grouping burst shots
burst_similarity_threshold	0.92	Similarity cutoff for burst grouping
ap_weight / nima_weight	0.6 / 0.4	Weights in the combined aesthetic score
aesthetic_per_scope_pct	75.0	Must be top (100 - pct)% within its scope
aesthetic_library_pct	50.0	Must also be top (100 - pct)% library-wide
speed_mode	full	fast skips some ML stages for a quick pass

Derived paths under <folder>/.selects/: index.db, thumbs/, previews/.

Per-trip customization — drop optional JSON into <folder>/.selects/ (missing/malformed falls back to defaults); see examples/ladakh/:

File	Purpose
landmarks.json	Named GPS landmarks — fast-path override for reverse geocoding
keywords.json	Theme buckets for pattern/thematic stories
tag_prompts.json	Zero-shot SigLIP tag taxonomy

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]" && pytest && ruff check .

Schema is managed with Alembic; migrations ship in selects/db/migrations/ (no alembic.ini) and init_db() upgrades each library's DB to head on open. After editing selects/db/models.py, autogenerate a revision against a throwaway SQLite URL and review it — SQLite ALTERs go through render_as_batch (enabled in env.py).

Layout

Path	Contents
selects/	Package: CLI, config, pipeline, DB models
selects/classical/	Non-ML scoring (blur, exposure, faces, auto-reject)
selects/decode/	Image / video / RAW decoding
selects/indexer/	Folder walking, EXIF, previews, orchestration
selects/ml/	Embedding, tagging, faces, clustering, stories, enhancement
selects/server/	FastAPI app, routes, WebSocket progress bus
frontend/	React + Vite + TypeScript web UI
tests/ · docs/	Test suite · landing page (GitHub Pages)

Desktop build — pip install "pyinstaller>=6.6" then python packaging/build.py [--ml]. It builds the frontend into selects/server/static/ (same-origin UI) and runs PyInstaller (onedir) via packaging/selects.spec into dist/selects/. For a smaller ML bundle, install CPU torch first: pip install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu.

Contributing

1. Fork, branch, pip install -e ".[dev]", add tests under tests/.
2. pytest and ruff check . must be green.
3. Open a PR — the architecture and roadmap are the best places to find direction.

Good first areas: GPU execution providers, the mobile client (the API already exists), export formats, and tuning aesthetic/burst defaults for different shooting styles.

Known limitations

• Aesthetic/burst thresholds were tuned on a single trip; may need adjustment for other styles/gear.
• List endpoints use offset/limit, not cursor-based, pagination.
• RAM++ tagging depends on a git-only model — slower, less reproducible install than the rest of [ml].

License

MIT — see LICENSE.