look · cull · loop

A darkroom for your digital library.

Eighty thousand photos, and the good ones are buried. Loupe is a self-hosted workbench for going through them — frame by frame, month by month — and deciding what to keep. Nothing is deleted by accident. Your photos never leave your machine.

Personal photo culling

A darkroom for your camera roll.

Eighty thousand photos pile up fast. Loupe lets you look at each one and keep only what matters — nothing deleted by accident.

look · cull · loop

loupe.local — Overview
look · cull · loop
TripsPlacesVaultSettings?
⌂ Overview
⌂ library 81,127 reviewed 14,902 (18%) cut 9,318 kept 5,584 remaining 66,225 reclaim 112.4 GB

the problem

Every backup keeps everything. Nothing decides.

Phones shoot in bursts. Cloud sync hoards. So the screenshots, the eleven near-identical sunsets, the accidental pocket shots — they all survive forever, right next to the photographs you actually love. Loupe is the opposite of a backup: a quiet, deliberate place to look closely and choose well.

overview

Your whole library, as a shelf of photobooks.

The home view lays the entire library out by year and month. Each month is a little photobook spread — two facing pages, hinged at the spine — so you can scan a decade at a glance and feel where the stories are.

The progress band across the top is always honest: how many frames are reviewed, how many cut and kept, what's left, and how much disk you'd reclaim by acting on the cuts.

A library you can hold in your hand, not a folder you dread opening.

Overview · 2023
2023 — 11,204 frames · 8 months reviewed

discovery

A film strip of forgotten moments.

Across the top of the overview, a 35 mm film strip drifts by — a slow, looping reel of random frames pulled from across the years, sprocket holes and all. Portrait shots sit pillarboxed on the film base, exactly as they would on real stock.

It's not a task list. It's an invitation: hover to pause, and any frame that catches your eye drops you straight into it. Pause, look, fall back in.

  • continuous sprocket perforations
  • hover-to-pause
  • respects reduced-motion
  • click any frame to open it
discovery

the month photobook

Open a month and it turns like a page.

Tap a month and it opens as a real spread — a hero frame or a mosaic, with a single right-hand page that turns left over the gutter. The selection is diversity-deduped: no two near-identical frames sit side by side, and it re-shuffles fresh on every visit, so the same month never looks the same twice.

Behind the scenes it's a perceptual-hash and timestamp guard picking the most distinct, in-focus frames from the pool — burst duplicates quietly stay out of the spread.

The best of a month, never the same six photos twice.

June 2023 — photobook
Stand-in photograph, left page
Stand-in photograph, right page
June 2023
long light over the water; a week away, then home.
214 frames · 62% reviewed

focus mode

Every frame, with the evidence to judge it.

Open a frame and the photo fills the room — brightest thing on the screen — with a quiet signal panel beside it. EXIF and capture details up top; then library-relative scores with percentile bars: an Apple aesthetic score, a sharpness read from a blur measurement, so you can tell a keeper from a near-miss at a glance.

Below that, content labels and the people in frame. Screenshots and documents are called out with their own tell. People who matter — family, the dogs — carry an amber ring, a standing reminder not to cull them by reflex.

  • EXIF & capture
  • aesthetic score
  • blur / sharpness
  • scene labels
  • protected people
focus — 1 of 214
Stand-in photograph in focus mode
Capture
cameraiPhone 15 Prolens26 mm ƒ1.8when2023-06-14 19:42size4032 × 3024
Signal
aesthetic0.81 · 92nd
sharpnesshigh · 78th
Content
golden hour 0.94coastline 0.88sky 0.81
People
familythe dogs
✕ cutskip✓ keep

culling & review

Keep, cut, skip — and change your mind anytime.

Three keys, that's the whole loop. Every decision is recorded, never enacted: a cut is just a mark. The stats bar's cut and kept counts are live links into full review grids, where keepers wear a green edge and cuts a dimmed red one.

Scan a whole decision at once, spot the one you got wrong, and flip it back. Protected frames are guarded — Loupe won't let a reflex cut take out someone who matters.

Reversible by design. The undo is the feature.

review — cut
Cut · 9,318 frames · tap any to restore

auto-flagged candidates

The easy cuts, gathered for you.

Loupe pre-sorts the obvious clutter into Candidates: screenshots, documents and receipts, and the genuinely blurry frames. They're suggestions, never automatic — a fast lane for the decisions that don't need much thought, so the real culling gets your full attention.

Those judgments lean on Apple's enrichment already baked into the library — aesthetic scores, scene labels, and recognized people — surfaced in the signal panel rather than hidden in a database.

  • screenshots
  • documents
  • blurry
  • aesthetic scores
  • scene labels
candidates
screenshots · 4,107documents · 1,962blurry · 2,344

and three more ways through

Place, journey, and a shelf of your own.

The same library, entered from a different door — because how you remember a photo is rarely by its date.

Stand-in postcard photographLPseen
Marfa
Texas
Mar 2022 · 64 frames

Places

A map of everywhere you've shot, clustered into postcards on a charcoal bench. Roughly three in five frames carry GPS, and Loupe turns those into a browsable atlas — and into place-burst candidates worth a second look.

LPtrip
Lisbon
Portugal
9 days612 frames88 kept

Trips

Loupe stitches your travel into journeys — around a hundred of them — each a travel-wrapped contact sheet you sweep with a loupe. Cull a whole trip in one sitting, the way you'd lay prints out on a table.

VAULT · PRIVATE

Vault

A third axis beyond keep and cut: a private shelf. Anything you vault is hidden everywhere — overview, trips, places — and held out of any export or delete. Some frames aren't for culling. They're just yours.

the ethos

A darkroom, not a shredder.

Culling should feel calm, not dangerous. Loupe is built on one promise: nothing leaves without your say-so, and anything can be taken back. Decisions are marks on a sheet — you do the deleting, later, deliberately, when you're sure.

reversible

Nothing deleted by accident

A cut is a decision, not an action. The originals sit untouched until you choose to act, and every call is one tap from reversed. Live Photo motion files quietly follow their stills, so a pair is never half-culled.

guarded

The people who matter, protected

Family and the dogs carry a standing guard. Loupe refuses to cull protected frames on reflex and rings them everywhere they appear, so the photos you'd most regret losing are the ones it's hardest to lose.

honest

◧ Progress you can trust

No dark patterns, no streaks, no nagging. Just an honest tally — reviewed, cut, kept, remaining, and the disk you'd reclaim — so you always know exactly where you stand and can stop whenever you like.

self-hosted & private

It runs on your machine. Your photos stay yours.

Loupe is one small program you run at home, pointed at your own library. No accounts, no uploads, no third party in the middle of your memories. The library is read-only to Loupe; only your decisions are ever written down.

private

Nothing leaves home

Your photographs are never uploaded, indexed by anyone else, or shown to a model in the cloud. The app sits behind your own access; the originals never move.

read-only

The library is never touched

Loupe reads your photos and metadata and writes only to its own decisions file. Your originals, your folder structure, and your backups stay exactly as they were.

yours

A personal tool, shared

Loupe was built for one person's library and offered to anyone who wants the same calm way through theirs. Self-host it; it's yours to run.