Latent is a macOS app for photographers with a large archive of RAW and JPEG files. It builds a fast local index, so you can browse the whole archive, search it by meaning, and arrange what you find into Sequences. Your originals stay where they are.
Install Latent Read the source
Developer preview · Apple Silicon · macOS 26
These are 21 photographs from Audiofool's archive. When this page was built, Latent's on-device engine, EmbeddingGemma 2, encoded each photo's 512-pixel contact preview and each search above. Latent's own ranking code put them in order, and the scores are cosine similarity. Open a photo to search with it instead. Nothing you do here leaves this page.
Timeline
Latent reads each photo once and keeps a local index of previews and metadata. After that, a photo-first gallery and a year, month, and day timeline move through the archive at the speed of local files. It has been tested with more than 40,000 photos.
Originals stay on a local disk, an external drive, or a mounted cloud drive. Browsing never downloads, moves, renames, or rewrites them.
AI Search
Describe a photo in any language, or start from a reference image. Sort the results by most similar, least similar, or more variety, and open similar photos from any picture.
Each engine keeps its own index, and you switch between them explicitly.
Contact sheet
Rate, flag, and caption photos, star the ones you come back to, and filter by date, rating, Starred, and flag.
Curation
Arrange selections in order, in nested folders, with drag and drop. Export a Sequence as a folder of symbolic links to the originals, so another app can open it without copies.
Imports
Add camera cards or folders, and Latent builds previews for ARW, JPEG, HEIF, PNG, and TIFF. It can copy originals into an archive folder and verify every checksum.
Prepare a batch for DxO PhotoLab, and Latent saves the finished photos next to their originals. Interval shooting is found from EXIF data and collapsed into one entry in the timeline.
Curator
The curator explains why photos are related and finds visual motifs that recur across years. It reports what the stored vectors and EXIF data show. It does not guess who is in a photo, where it was taken, or what story it tells.
Latent has no accounts and no telemetry. The catalog, the previews, the vectors, and your ratings, captions, and Sequences stay on your Mac. What leaves it depends on the search engine.
| Engine | Sent off the Mac |
|---|---|
| Gemini Embedding 2 | 512-pixel contact previews when you build the index, plus search text and reference images |
| EmbeddingGemma 2 | Nothing |
Read only
Your originals and sidecars. Browsing and search only read them. Photos you delete go to a Latent Trash folder beside them, and you can restore them from there.
Rebuildable
Metadata, contact and preview images, and search vectors, in a local SQLite catalog and cache. Delete it, and Latent rebuilds it from the archive.
Yours
Ratings, captions, flags, Sequences, imports, and search history, kept apart from the index. Export it as a backup; importing it merges and never overwrites.
A Python service owns all three layers. The native app, built with SwiftUI and AppKit, talks to it over loopback HTTP. The same service also serves a browser gallery at 127.0.0.1:8766.
Latent is a developer preview. It runs from a source checkout, and there is no packaged download yet. You need:
brew install exiftoolgit clone https://github.com/Audiofool934/latent.git
cd latent
uv sync
scripts/build-macos.sh
open var/native/Latent.appThen, in the app:
The README covers the Gemini API key, on-device search, and the command line.