Private AI for your photos and videos
The most useful features in modern photo apps come from AI: search that understands what's in a picture, faces grouped by person, captions written for you. Most services run that AI on their own servers, which means your photos go there to be analysed. It doesn't have to work that way.
What photo AI can do
- Understand what's in a photo: people, places, objects, animals, text on signs and documents, and what's happening in the scene.
- Search in plain words. Type "the dog on the beach" or "birthday cake" instead of scrolling through years of thumbnails.
- Find moments inside videos. Long videos are understood scene by scene, so a search can take you to the exact moment, not only the file.
- Group faces, so you can see every photo of one person.
- Write captions and tags for you, which makes sharing and sorting much faster.
Cloud AI versus local AI
With cloud AI, your photos are processed on a company's computers. The results can be excellent, but the company and its AI systems see whatever they process. Depending on their terms, some companies may be able to use that data for their own benefit, or sell it.
With local AI, the models run on a computer you own. Your photos are analysed where they're stored and nothing is uploaded for processing. A few years ago this needed expensive hardware. Today, capable models for image understanding, search and captioning run on home servers and recent Macs.
Why it matters where the AI runs
AI features need to look closely at your photos, often closer than any person would. They know who appears with whom, where you were and when, and what is in the background. That is exactly the information a private library should keep at home.
Running the AI locally has practical benefits too. It keeps working without an internet connection, there is no per-photo processing cost, and your library can't be used to train someone else's model.
What local AI trades off
Processing a large library for the first time takes a while on home hardware, from hours to days depending on its size and the machine. After that, new photos are handled as they arrive. The biggest cloud models can still be more capable at some tasks. For search, tagging and captions, local models are now good enough for everyday use.
Where Top Drawer fits
Top Drawer's AI runs on your own server or computer, or even a virtual server at a provider you choose and trust. It understands what's in every photo and video, lets you search in plain words, finds the moment inside a video, and drafts captions when you want to share something. Nothing is ever sent to an AI company. Read more about what makes photo storage private.