wtf is lap?

Lap is a photo manager you install on your own computer, built for people who have large collections of photos and videos stored locally and want a fast, private way to browse and organize them. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it works directly with the folders you already have on your hard drive instead of forcing you to import everything into a separate closed system. The core idea is privacy and control. Your photos never have to leave your machine: there is no required cloud account, no forced upload, and the AI features that power search, similarity matching, smart tagging, and face grouping all run locally rather than sending your images to a server. This makes it a good fit for anyone who wants the convenience of modern photo search without handing their personal photos to a cloud provider. Lap includes a wide set of organizing tools. You can browse by timeline, folder, location, camera, tag, rating, or recognized faces, and save custom Smart Albums that automatically group photos by rules you set. Collections let you group files together without duplicating or moving the original photos. It also recognizes Apple Live Photos and can pair RAW files with matching JPEG or HEIC images, keeping them together when you rename, move, or delete. Built-in tools help find duplicate photos, compare similar images side by side, and do basic edits like cropping, rotating, and resizing. Because Lap works directly on your existing folders, your original files stay untouched as ordinary files you could open in any other app. Information Lap adds, like tags, ratings, and album groupings, is stored separately in Lap's own local database, so it does not travel with the files if you copy or move them outside the app. Lap is free and open source, with no subscription required, and supports over 60 photo, RAW, and video formats.