2026-07 · 1 min read

Sorting through thousands of photos using sift

A few years ago I started getting interested in photography. After watching the experts of Youtube I finally bought a Fujifilm X100VI as my first camera. While it was a bit expensive as a first camera, it ticked a lot of boxes for me;

  • Small and light
  • Great photo capabilities
  • Easy to learn for a first timer (well, mostly)
  • Built in ND filter and IBIS

I'm now 2 years in and looking back, I've taken a lot of photos. Most of them are trash. But I haven't had the time to go through them all and remove the bad ones until recently. And that's when I discovered that it was a massive headache. I've been shooting in both jpeg and raw, slowly filling up my NAS with gunk. Having these image pairs also made it very annoying to manually remove, since my file manager doesn't show me thumbnails for raw files I need to match by filenames and it's just a big hassle.

So l did what everyone else is doing in 2026; I made a small app with Claude to help me sort things out. I call it Sift.

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It works by indexing folders, extracting exif data and thumbnails, and then having a fast "keep / discard" flow for me to delete the photos that are unwanted. This greatly improves the workflow since smb isn't super fast.

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After choosing the photos to discard, we batch delete them.

The app is running locally on my machine, so setup is minimal. I did add a nice kde desktop file so I can open it using the app launcher.

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There is even support for having multiple people making decisions but for now it's just me working through the mountain om photos.