The nine apps, and who each one is for
1. FolioSort — best for finding one person and getting a folder of them
OURS · MACOS 14+ (APPLE SILICON + INTEL), WINDOWS 10 1809+ / 11 (X64) · ELITE €39.99
ONE-TIME, 3 DEVICES ACROSS MAC + WINDOWS · FREE 20-PHOTO TASTER
A native Mac and Windows photo and video organizer that works on your real folders — no catalog, no
import. Find a Person finds everyone matching 1–3 reference photos
across the folders and drives you indexed; People groups faces with no
example photo and can split a library into one folder per person. The models (YuNet finds faces, AuraFace
compares them) are bundled in the app.
Reasons to choose it:
- Identity matches from a photo of the person, not look-alike scenes.
- Copy to Folder gives you a real folder and leaves every original in place.
- Smart Folders can narrow a saved search to one person, so a
folder of your daughter keeps filling itself.
- Names go into XMP sidecars that Lightroom, Capture One
and digiKam read; RAW files are never modified.
- One-time price, used in 80+ countries, 12M+ files processed, a 14-day full refund with no conditions,
and the independent developer answers support e-mail.
Reasons to skip it: desktop only — no phone app or web gallery. Not an editor or a
keyword-tagging catalog. The free plan is a taster (20 photos copied from matches, People on a sample), not
a way to run a whole library.
2. digiKam — best free, catalog-based
FREE · OPEN SOURCE (KDE) · WINDOWS 10+, MACOS, LINUX · VERSION 9.1.0 (JUNE 2026)
The most capable free photo manager, with deep-learning face detection and recognition (OpenCV DNN,
GPU-accelerated) that runs locally, over albums mapped to disk folders and a SQLite or MariaDB database.
Reasons to choose it: free, three platforms, and face recognition, tags and ratings
in one catalog.
Reasons to skip it: it is a database you look after, with a steep learning curve.
Searching from a reference photo and exporting one person to a folder are not described on its features
page, so we do not claim them.
3. Apple Photos People — best if your photos are already in Apple Photos
FREE · BUILT INTO MACOS · MAC ONLY
The People album groups faces with nothing to install. But Apple Photos is library-based: photos are kept
inside a single Photos Library package, not your own Finder folders, so it only helps with photos imported
into it.
Reasons to choose it: your photos already live in the Photos library and you only
use a Mac.
Reasons to skip it: photos on external drives or a NAS must be imported first, and
there is no Windows version.
4. Immich — best self-hosted, with phone access
FREE · OPEN SOURCE (AGPL-3.0) · SELF-HOSTED SERVER (DOCKER) · V3.2.2 (SEPTEMBER 2026)
The self-hosted Google Photos replacement most people land on: phone backup, facial recognition and
clustering, CLIP and text-in-image search, on a server you run.
Reasons to choose it: you want your photos and faces on your phone, from anywhere,
without Google.
Reasons to skip it: you become the administrator — Linux recommended, Docker and
Compose, at least 6 GB of RAM (4 GB only with machine learning off), and a database to back up.
5. Mylio Photos — best for a library synced across devices
SUBSCRIPTION · $240/YEAR OR $25/MONTH (INDIVIDUAL) · MACOS, WINDOWS, IOS, ANDROID · 7-DAY TRIAL
A folder-preserving library with offline face recognition, AI search, duplicate review and peer-to-peer
sync between your devices.
Reasons to choose it: the same library on phone and computer without a cloud
service holding it.
Reasons to skip it: it is a subscription — one year costs more than most one-time
options here.
6. Excire Foto 2027 — best local AI catalog
ONE-TIME €229 · MACOS, WINDOWS · ALL AI LOCAL
A catalog with on-device face recognition, automatic keywording and natural-language prompt search across
content, faces, scenes and text; Excire says everything runs locally. For Lightroom Classic there is the
Excire Search 2026 plugin (€199).
Reasons to choose it: a full local AI catalog with keywords and ratings.
Reasons to skip it: the price, and the catalog — it organizes inside its own
collections and does not claim to sort files into folders.
7. Tonfotos — best for family archives
FREE VERSION + PERSONAL $59 / FAMILY $159 ONE-TIME · WINDOWS, MACOS, LINUX
On-device face recognition, a view of your photos by year and date without relocating the files, a
duplicate finder and family-tree features.
Reasons to choose it: a family archive where faces connect to a family tree.
Reasons to skip it: the free version limits how many people it recognises and
collects anonymous statistics.
8. RetinaTag — best no-cost newcomer
FREE · MACOS (APPLE SILICON), WINDOWS X64 · 100% OFFLINE
A free, offline app with on-device face clustering, local CLIP search and EXIF-date sorting when importing
from USB or SD cards.
Reasons to choose it: you want to try offline face clustering for nothing.
Reasons to skip it: it is a very young one-developer project (repository created in
March 2026), and it does not list Intel Macs.
9. PhotoPrism — best self-hosted alternative to Immich
FREE COMMUNITY EDITION (AGPL-3.0) + PAID MEMBERSHIPS · SELF-HOSTED SERVER (DOCKER)
A self-hosted library with face recognition, automatic labels, reverse geocoding and duplicate detection;
it can also read metadata from Google Photos exports.
Reasons to choose it: a self-hosted web library, if you prefer it to Immich.
Reasons to skip it: it is a server — at least 2 cores, 3 GB of RAM and 4 GB of swap,
Docker recommended.