Damselfly

Damselfly is a self-hosted photo management application focused on fast browsing and search across large local photo libraries. It indexes folders of images, extracts metadata, and provides a responsive web interface to organize and find photos quickly, including people-based discovery using face recognition.

Key Features

• Library indexing from filesystem folders with background scanning
• Responsive web UI optimized for fast browsing of large collections
• Face recognition for grouping and searching people (face tagging/workflows)
• Metadata support (EXIF/IPTC) and keyword/tag-based organization
• Powerful search and filtering (by tags, people, and common photo attributes)
• Thumbnail generation and caching for performance
• Container-friendly deployment (commonly run via Docker)

Use Cases

• Replace cloud photo services for private browsing and search of a home photo archive
• Curate and find photos for creative work using tags/metadata and fast filtering
• Identify and organize photos of family members using face recognition

Limitations and Considerations

• Face recognition requires additional compute and works best with well-lit, clear faces; initial indexing can be time-consuming on large libraries

Damselfly is a good fit for users who want a lightweight, performance-oriented photo library browser with strong local search, metadata handling, and face-based organization. It is commonly used as a private alternative to cloud photo galleries while keeping files in normal folders on disk.