Finally found a Google Photos replacement that actually works offline

So I've been degoogling for about a year now and Google Photos was honestly the last thing I couldnt let go of. Tried Immich (too much setup for my non-technical wife), tried digiKam (feels like it was made in 2005), even tried just using Windows Photos and... yeah.

A couple weeks ago I stumbled on this app called PhotoCHAT on the Microsoft Store and honestly I'm kind of shocked more people arent talking about it. Its a photo manager that runs completely offline, like actually offline, not "offline but we sync your metadata to our servers" offline. Everything stays on your machine.

But heres the thing that blew me away, the search. You can type natural language stuff and it actually finds the right photos. I tried "a photo of girl in a blue top and white shorts playing with a dog in the park" and it pulled up exactly what I was looking for. You can just type 1 or 2 word searches as well as if you were searching tags (but obviously without ever having to manuallly create a tag). Then I tried more specific searches like "a woman in a blue dress standing near a lake" and it nailed it. Even tried "birthday cake with 6 candles" from like 3 years ago buried in a folder I forgot existed and there it was. Its using some kind of AI model locally (CLIP under the hood I think?) and everything runs on your GPU so nothing leaves your computer. But also works on CPU only without issues as well (I dont have a GPU).

The face recognition is also surprisingly good. It clustered like 90% of my familys photos correctly after the initial scan, and the ones it wasnt sure about it groups together so you can just confirm or deny. Way less manual work then I expected.

UI is really clean and modern too which I wasnt expecting from a smaller app. Its got albums, favorites, a full image editor built in, even voice search if your into that.

No subscription either which is nice. Buy the license once and own it.

Its on the Microsoft Store if anyone wants to check it out. Just search PhotoCHAT. Would love to see this get more traction because the dev clearly put alot of work into it and its exactly what this community has been asking for.