As a photographer, my photo albums have been disorganized messes that I don’t dare to touch. Years of shooting have made my edit pile so big that even finding the right photo feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Your phone galleries will be easily handled by the likes of Google and Apple Photos apps, and there are tricks to make Google Photos search work smarter for you. However, if you’re trying to find that one age-old photo on your PC, you might as well give up before even getting started.
Thankfully, there’s a surprisingly simple solution to all your disorganized photo albums. It works on every PC OS, and you can get it for free.
DigiKam brings AI to desktop photo organization
A pro-grade tool for photo hoarders
digiKam isn’t your typical photo gallery app. It’s built from the ground up for managing, organizing, and searching photo archives of any size. Beyond usual image categorization features like labels, the app also uses AI to identify faces and common objects in your photos.
This means you can search for what’s in the photo instead of the file name. The latest version at the time of writing uses models like YOLOv11-Nano, YOLOv11-XLarge, and EfficientNet B7 to automatically detect and tag objects, animals, plants, and even events in your photos. Overall, the AI can identify over 1,000 objects and scenes.
It also works with faces, but you’ll have to create tags first in order for digiKam to remember them. Unlike cloud-based solutions, digiKam’s face detection happens entirely on your computer using neural networks based on OpenCV, one of the world’s biggest open-source computer vision libraries.
Additionally, the program can also automatically evaluate your photos for quality using its image quality scanner. It analyzes noise, blur, composition, and other factors to assign quality ratings. This is especially helpful for photographers who shoot in bursts, as it makes it easy to find the best quality image from a particular burst of shots.
Last but not least, digiKam also has editing, post-processing, and batch processing capabilities you find in more advanced tools like Adobe Lightroom. These aren’t the most powerful editing features, but you can make basic edits like color correction, cropping, and some quick retouching. This makes it a great free Lightroom alternative as well.
How to get your photos in order
From chaos to clean in minutes
Before you can organize your photos and start searching through them, they need to be imported into digiKam. The software supports over 200 RAW image formats, videos, and even MP3 files. You can also pull photos or videos straight from any folder or connected cameras.
DigiKam asks you where you store your photos during initial installation so you should already have all your photos imported as soon as you open the program. However, if your photos are scattered across your drive, you can use the Import menu in the program’s toolbar to import individual photos or folders. You can also add your camera to the program for more direct syncing or import photos from USB drives, card readers, and even Google Drive.
Once you’re done with the import, it’s time to scan your photos. Head over to the Tags section and click the Auto-tag Scan button to start scanning your images. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’ve got thousands of photos. It’ll also require decent hardware if you don’t want your computer to spend days importing and analyzing all photos.
These auto-assigned tags are mostly accurate, but you will see oddities from time to time. For example, digiKam mistagged my Pixel 9a as a remote control and my headphones as a mic. On the flip side, it was able to detect images of Persian cats in my library without a hitch.
Detecting and working with faces is also rather easy. Select the album you want to scan in the Albums section, right-click it, then click Scan for Faces. You’ll find all detected faces in the People section, where you can browse them and add names by hovering over the detected face.
You only need to add a name to one instance of a detected face, obviously. Once you do, the name is saved as a tag, and you can look up all images with the same person in them.
And that’s all you need to do. DigiKam does cache thumbnails and metadata, so you can breeze through your gallery without waiting for photos to load. From this point onwards, your entire selection of imported photos is intelligently tagged and searchable. You can also choose to use a combination of date-based albums and hierarchical tags for further organization.
DigiKam isn’t perfect, and the AI models can fail to detect or automatically tag random objects in your photos from time to time. However, unless you’re willing to go through thousands of photos and tag them yourself, it’s your best shot without costing a penny.
The tool also keeps learning and improving. As you take and import new photos, they’re automatically organized and tagged. Your photo library maintains itself, leaving you free to focus on taking photos and if needed, editing them.
