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Settings

Settings control theme, indexing behavior, face thresholds, burst windows, map cache, updates, and maintenance actions.

Changes are persisted locally in user config storage.

Appearance

  • Theme — dark, light, or follow the system theme.
  • Thumbnail size — grid density. Smaller thumbnails fit more photos per row at the cost of per-photo detail.
  • Show photo stacks in timeline — collapse conservative burst and duplicate groups into one timeline tile. Turn this off to show every photo individually.

Indexing

  • Scan hidden folders — include directories starting with .. Off by default because hidden folders often contain metadata, not photos.
  • Date format — how dates render in day headers and insights.

Assets

  • Asset inventory — shows local runtimes, models, and offline data Smriti can use, including their status, size, and on-disk location.
  • Asset locations — each row shows the exact file path Smriti is using. In development checkouts and portable installs, assets may be resolved from different search roots.

Assets live outside the main app binary so the installer stays small. Timeline browsing still works when optional assets are missing; local face recognition, place lookup, and local visual search depend on the matching assets being installed.

  • Download visual model — installs the optional local ViT-B-32 SigLIP2 256 semantic search model. The download is large and is stored in the user asset directory, not bundled into Smriti.
  • Index visual search — creates per-library image vectors under <library>/.photovault/semantic. It also requires the ONNX Runtime installed by Download assets. It is resumable; rerun it after adding new files.
  • Recheck visual search — refreshes the status counts shown in Settings.

Once installed and indexed, Search can match text such as beach sunset against image meaning, and Photo Detail can show visually similar photos.

Face Recognition

  • Face confidence — minimum detection score for a face to be stored. Lower values catch more faces but also more false positives.
  • Clustering threshold — how tolerant the system is when grouping visually similar faces. Lower means tighter clusters (more groups, cleaner), higher means looser (fewer groups, more mixing). Default works for most libraries.

See the People and Faces guide for the full pipeline.

Burst detection

  • Burst window — time window (in seconds) used to group burst shots. Default 3 seconds matches most camera apps.

Photo stacks reuse burst and duplicate detection results. After either detector runs, Smriti refreshes stack suggestions and chooses a best photo using the detector’s suggestion plus quality signals such as resolution, file size, faces, sharpness, and exposure.

Trash

  • Auto-delete after — days before trashed photos are permanently removed. Default 30.

Map

  • Tile cache size — how much disk space tile caching can use. Clearing the cache forces a redownload on next view.
  • Home city override — used for trip-detection and “photos from this trip” grouping.

Memories

  • Enable memories — toggle the “on this day” cards in the Timeline banner and the dedicated Memories view.

Updates

  • Automatically check for updates — when enabled, Smriti queries api.github.com at most once every 24 hours to see if a new release has been published. This is opt-in and off by default. See PRIVACY.md for the full disclosure.
  • Check for updates now — run the check immediately, regardless of the automatic-check setting.

When an update is available, a banner appears at the top of the app with a Download button. What the button does depends on how you installed Smriti:

  • AppImage, portable Windows zip — downloads the new artifact, verifies its SHA256 against the published SHA256SUMS, and atomically replaces the running binary. You’ll be prompted to relaunch.
  • Windows MSI — downloads the new MSI, triggers the Windows installer with a UAC prompt. Smriti exits; relaunch from the Start menu when the install completes.
  • macOS .dmg — downloads the new .dmg and opens it. Drag the new .app into /Applications as you did for the first install.
  • System package manager (apt, brew, flatpak, winget) — the banner shows the matching upgrade command instead of self-replacing. Smriti won’t interfere with your package manager.
  • Source build — the banner suggests git pull && cargo build --release.

Maintenance actions

These are one-shot operations — Smriti doesn’t run them on a schedule.

  • Rescan Library — re-walk the drive and pick up newly added, moved, or deleted files.
  • Rebuild Faces (Full) — re-run face detection + clustering from scratch. Useful after a face-model update.
  • Check for Changes — scan for moves and deletions without re-indexing unchanged files.
  • Regenerate Thumbnails — rebuild all three thumbnail tiers.
  • Refresh Capture Dates — re-read capture dates for photos and videos. Smriti prefers embedded metadata, then strict filename dates, and uses file modified time only as a marked fallback.
  • Asset Inventory — inspect which local model/runtime/data files are present and which exact paths Smriti resolved.
  • Download Assets — downloads the optional Smriti asset pack from the GitHub release and installs it into the app’s managed asset folder.
  • Fix Rotated Photos — regenerate cached data for photos whose EXIF orientation wasn’t previously applied.

Keyboard shortcuts

See the Keyboard shortcuts guide for the full list. Settings also renders an inline reference at the bottom.