Face Tagger (Linux and Windows PORTABLE)

Glenn

Glenn

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FaceTagger — A Modern Local Alternative to Windows Live Photo Gallery & Picasa

If you've been searching for something to fill the gap left by Windows Live Photo Gallery (discontinued 2017) and Google Picasa (killed 2016), FaceTagger was built with exactly that loss in mind. Like those tools, it handles large local photo libraries with face detection and tagging — but it does it with AI that would have seemed like science fiction back then. There are no subscriptions, no cloud uploads, no account required, and no photo data ever leaves your machine. All AI models, databases, and settings live inside the application folder, so it's fully portable: put it on a USB drive or a network share and it works exactly the same.
What makes FaceTagger stand out against other modern alternatives is the depth underneath what looks like a straightforward face tagger. The AI suggestion engine continuously scores untagged faces against your confirmed identities in real time, surfacing its best guesses as you work rather than making you do manual batch runs. When you confirm a face, that decision gets written directly into the image file's metadata (or a sidecar file for RAW formats like NEF and DNG) using ExifTool — so your tagging work survives a complete database wipe and is readable by other software. Quality scoring automatically filters out low-value detections like ears and blurry blobs before they clutter your view, something neither WLPG nor Picasa ever managed. And because it's built to handle truly large libraries without freezing, it uses memory-mapped processing, WAL-mode SQLite, and a GPU-aware inference pipeline that keeps the UI responsive while the AI scans in the background.
Linux users in particular have been badly underserved here. Most face-tagging tools either don't run on Linux at all, or treat it as a secondary platform — a port that was done reluctantly, tested minimally, and left to bitrot. FaceTagger is one of the first face taggers built for Linux as a genuine first-class target, not an afterthought. Both the Linux and Windows builds go through the same development and testing, both get the same features at the same time, and the Linux version is not a slower or stripped-down cousin of anything. If you migrated from Windows to Linux and assumed you'd have to give up proper photo face-tagging, FaceTagger is the answer you've been waiting for. Whether you're migrating a decade of family photos or starting fresh, it's the closest thing to "what Photo Gallery should have grown into" — and unlike Photo Gallery, it actually runs on the OS you're using now.


DOWNLOADS:

Windows: (ppApp only for now):

Linux: (LLApp only for now):


Please if you use this and it works or doesn't let me know so I can fix any issues, just reply here and say how it goes. I'll do a full on release soon, but I am pretty worn out polishing the last few bugs getting windows to work as well as Linux was.
 
My Bugs I've fixed since Public 6-02 release above: (change log)

* Faces Tab Selecting a label of an item would unselect all items even when Keep Selection was enabled.
* Faces Tab Right clicking a unselected tile would unselect all items even when Keep Selection was enabled.
* Suggestions weren't showing on the Viewer tab anymore.
* Suggestiuons were calculating again even thought only confirming suggestions.
* Database WAL was causing bottlenecks with massive flushing of cache at random intervals, set it to 50MB so it does it more often but quicker.
* Shrunk Face regions to shown square instead of label on he viewer tab, group photos were too hard to click a face.

New Features:

* Added mousewheel zoom to Viewer (you can draw regions while zoomed in)
* Arrow Keys to move between Viewer images, Space bar will hide Region boxes/labels

As I am actually using this now to tag my own large collection I am going to find missing things and bugs, I'll keep a log of them here so you can look out for them yourselves.


NOTES:

I am still tuning the WAL stuff, it writes the database after 1000 pages (whatever that is) and it makes a mechanical spinning HDD busy for a minute or two while it flushes the cache to the actual database, this is VERY noticable, you may need to have a stretch and lean back for a quick break by then, so if you notice it's slowed down, that is whats happening. It confused me for a while until I learnt what was actually happening, I kept thinking a scanner had started up or it was stuck sorting faces, nope it's the garbage collection.
 
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Ugh, there is a caching bug I just discovered that made it throw away users tags on quit - reloading, I have it fixed now, but man I thought it was all going so well. I'll push a release at a later date, I really did think it was all ok, but had tagged many thousands of faces, so wouldn't have noticed the few faces coming back while testing things, until now when I was using it properly.
 
I have been spending my day redoing the whole GUI management of things, hopefully to get it to stop stalling out or getting confused or droping caches etc, it's been getting worse and then better throughout the day, I'll hold off doing a re-release until I get it right as it wasn't until I started actually using it myself that I started seeing what was wrong.
 
Ok, I am unwell at the moment, but I am doing a new build with all the fixes in place, I now uses a warm cache to handle things faster in the GUI that get packaged by user changes and auto scanners, so it shouldn't have the slowdowns anymore. I also made it stick to the person and tile you are working on, so it doesn't disappear when you navigate to other filter and sections. so it's much more usable. it's not had a good testing still, but each part was tested as I added them, I also did a different build that taught me a few limitations and I revert back to before I started it and did it again. so I trust the new methods.

ANYWAY, I'll get it released properly today and the cache issues will be gone, it should be what the first release was meant to be. There will always be more work to do, but it will be fully usable now. I'll be back to edit the first post once I build the two updated 2026.06.06 release. Sorry I found the bug after my last build, I was excited to get some people using it and perhaps some feedback for getting it perfect for you all too.

Back in a hour or two.
 
well that was fun, after compiling it (which takes over an hour), i found out windows can't track running threads the same way as linux, so i had to change it to count a different way, meaning I am going to recompile it again, but at least now it's working in windows with multiple libraries like it was 2 days ago before i made them run parallel.
 
changing the thread checking to a flag wasn't ok with three other parts of my code, so i'll have to wait until tomorrow to fix them now. out of AI credits and I need its help to sort the preloaded, I'll have to give it another test in windows then compile, it's slow going.
 
Very productive day, I still need to test everything I've done, but it's saved 1/6th the startup time and it's gone down from 12.7GB to 8.6GB ram usage with the exact same libraries loaded. I've fixed some long standing bugs, like really slow to confirm the first face on startup. I've added more debugging to the terminal. It's all just about testing and polish now. Like I had a couple of days ago before the cache overwrite issue humbled me again.

I'll keep working on it as I feel it's important, it'll be the last one ever made before AI takes over and everything is online. so I want it to be good and future proof too.
 
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