Getting Started
This guide walks through the first ten minutes of using Smriti: choosing a library, what happens during the first scan, and where your data lives.
What Smriti is
Smriti is a desktop photo library — Linux, macOS, Windows. It points at a folder or drive containing your photos and indexes them in place. Your originals stay where they are; Smriti reads them, extracts metadata (dates, GPS, camera, faces), and writes a small SQLite database alongside the photos.
There’s no cloud upload, no account, no server. Open the app, browse, close it.
First run
- Launch Smriti. The Welcome screen invites you to pick or drop a folder.
- Pick a library. Drag a folder onto the window, or click Browse to pick one. Smriti remembers it and offers it again next time.
- (Optional) Install the asset pack. A first-run prompt may ask to download ~250 MB of ONNX face-recognition models + the GeoNames offline geocoding database. Declining is fine — face features and place names are the only things gated on this. The rest of the app works without it.
- Watch the scan. The timeline populates live as photos are indexed. The first scan on a 10K-photo library typically takes 5–15 minutes. Face detection then runs as a separate pass and can take longer — see People and Faces for how to speed that up with an optional remote GPU.
Where your data goes
- Originals — untouched, in their folders.
- Database — at
<library>/.photovault/photovault.db, on the same drive as the photos. Unplug the drive, plug it into another machine, point Smriti there: same library, same faces, same albums. - Thumbnails — at
<library>/.photovault/thumbnails/, three sizes, generated on demand. - Application settings — in your OS’s user config directory
(Linux:
~/.config/smriti/, macOS:~/Library/Application Support/smriti/, Windows:%APPDATA%\smriti\). Theme preference, sidebar state, recently opened libraries.
The library is fully portable. Backing it up = backing up the drive.
What to do next
- Browse the Timeline — your main view.
- Once face detection finishes, head to People to name a few faces.
- Try Search:
paris 2018,dad in tokyo,this month. - Open the Map view if your photos have GPS data.
Common first-run questions
Why is the scan so slow? The first scan walks every file under the library root, reads EXIF, hashes each file for dedup, and (with the asset pack installed) runs face detection. Modern 10K-photo libraries take 5–20 minutes total. Subsequent reindexes are incremental — only changed files are revisited. See Indexing.
Where do I add more folders?
Smriti indexes one library at a time. Switch libraries via the
Welcome screen or Settings → Open another library. Each library
has its own .photovault/ database; switching back and forth is
instant.
Can I move my library to another drive?
Yes. Copy the folder including the hidden .photovault/ directory.
Open Smriti on the new machine, point it at the new location.
Everything resumes — thumbnails, face names, albums, search history.
Face recognition is disabled — what now? The asset pack wasn’t installed, or your hardware ran out of memory during model load. See Troubleshooting.