You can get most of the way with existing tools and only build the last step yourself. For grouping photos by person, face clustering already works well. Immich (open source, self-hosted) detects faces and groups them into people automatically, and you can name each person. digiKam (open source desktop app) does face detection and recognition too and works on local folders. If you want to script it, InsightFace for face embeddings plus a simple clustering step (DBSCAN or HDBSCAN) gives you one cluster per person. The diploma idea is a nice way to name the clusters. For each cluster, run OCR (Tesseract or PaddleOCR, or a vision model) on the photos and look for the one that shows a diploma, take the name from it, and use that as the folder name. Then copy every photo in the cluster into that folder. Photos with several people can go into each person’s folder. Two things to watch: group photos and side angles cause most of the mistakes, so plan a quick manual review of clusters before you export. And since this is face recognition on real people, check consent rules for your school or country before you run it.

Adobe's decision to go with a shakedown subscripton model for its Creative Cloud apps has sparked a rush to create alternatives, particularly in the open-source community. We've looked at Darktable and digiKam and Lap among free open-source alternatives to Adobe's Lightroom Classic for both digital-asset management and RAW editing. But for people who already have muscle memory for Adobe's products, these programs have a steep learning curve.

Open, rate and develop CR3, NEF, ARW and twelve other RAW formats on a Chromebook, Linux or any computer with a browser. Nothing to install, and your photos never go anywhere.

Depends on how you use it and what image types you actually use. digiKam is more of a photo management tool (think photo album organisation). But it’s very fully featured and can of course view pretty much any image type. It’s what I ended up using most of the time I looked at photos. My current pick for a photo viewer is qView. Mostly for startup time compared to digiKam. But it’s basic. Basically just a box with the photo in it. I have used ImageGlass before. It’s a longstanding project, given that I last used it before 2020. It’s well designed and loaded quickly, though I think it did some sort of smart background preloading based on the order photo’s are navigated in. It is made by a lone developer in Vietnam. But the app is well built, well designed and has been that way for basically the last decade. There’s a reason it still tops many open source lists.

Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.