photoKam — Your Photos, On Your PC, Lightning Fast — No Cloud Required

Are hundreds of thousands of photos buried somewhere on an external hard drive? If File Explorer crawls, cloud storage feels risky, and Lightroom is too steep a learning curve — photoKam is exactly what you've been missing.

Why photoKam

Your photos belong on your PC

No need to upload anything to Google Photos, iCloud, or any other cloud service. photoKam requires no account and no login — just open and go. Your original files stay right where they are, while all indexes, thumbnails, and metadata are built and stored entirely on your own machine.

Handles hundreds of thousands of photos without breaking a sweat

Built-in file managers and viewers slow to a crawl as your library grows. photoKam uses high-speed proprietary indexing and a virtual-scroll gallery to load hundreds of thousands of photos instantly. Scroll through the gallery, change your search filters — the response is immediate, every time.

A lightweight, native app

Because it's native, the install footprint is small and memory and CPU usage stays low. It runs quietly in the background with no heavy runtimes or separate services required.

Key Features

Find shots exactly as you remember them — Precision EXIF Search

Filter by whatever you recall: which camera, which lens, which settings.

• Camera & lens multi-select

• ISO, aperture, and focal length range filters

• Date range, file extension, and filename combined search

• Sort by capture date, filename, or star rating

• Timeline view of the shooting period for currently displayed photos

Pulling only the night shots taken with a specific lens from thousands of images takes seconds.

Cull faster than ever — Star Ratings & Flags

Selecting the keepers is the most critical step in any photo workflow. photoKam is built around keyboard-first culling.

• 0–5 star ratings and Pick/Reject flags

• Rate quickly with keyboard shortcuts, filter instantly by rating

• Multi-select with Ctrl, Shift, or drag — apply changes in one go

• Deletes go to the OS Recycle Bin / Trash — mistakes are always recoverable

See every detail — Lightbox & Compare View

Open any photo from the gallery for smooth zoom and pan with a film-strip at the bottom.

• Overexposure (clipping) zebra warning overlay for exposure review

• Side-by-side compare view for 2–4 images (4 images in a 2×2 grid) with synchronized zoom and pan

• Previous/next navigation with arrow-key support

• Built-in video player — playback, scrubbing, volume, playback speed, and fullscreen, all included

Videos just play — Codecs built in

Tired of videos that won't open because of missing codecs? photoKam bundles the most common video codecs right inside the app. There's nothing extra for you to install.

• MP4, MOV, WebM and other natively supported formats play immediately

• Incompatible formats — AVI, M2TS, WMV, HEVC, 3GP and more — are automatically transcoded to a playback MP4 on the fly (cached for reuse)

• Tricky formats like PCM-audio MOV files are handled without any extra fuss

Never touch the original — Lossless Rotation & External Editor Integration

• Photo rotation: preserves EXIF data and targets lossless rotation applied directly to the original

• Video rotation: corrects MP4, MOV, M4V, and 3GP files by rewriting the display matrix — no re-encoding

• Open in external editor: hand off instantly to Photoshop, a video editor, or your OS default app

• Right-click to reveal the file's location in File Explorer or Finder

Never miss a file — Auto-Scan & Error Management

• Incremental auto-scan on launch — files added or changed while the app was closed are picked up automatically

• View the indexing error log, retry failed items only, or trigger a full rescan

• Exclude folders to skip paths you don't need

• Detailed EXIF and file-info panel with a pin option so data stays visible even when selection changes

Tailored to your setup — Settings

• Dark/Light theme, UI density, and thumbnail size options

• Gallery rendering load controls (pre-draw range and async decoding)

• Indexing concurrency, prefetch range, and storage and cache location management

Who Is photoKam For?

System Requirements

• Platforms: Windows · macOS (desktop install)

• Images: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, and more

• Video: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM native playback + AVI, M2TS, WMV, MKV, 3GP auto-transcoded playback

Licensing & Pricing

Free for personal, non-commercial use. A separate license is required for business, institutional, or commercial use.