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Notes from the Siegu project

What it's like building a private, local-first photo library — from the person building it.

September 2026

Why “private by design” beats a privacy policy

Every photo service has a privacy policy. And every one of them can upload your photos. A policy just describes what a company may legally do with your data — it doesn't prevent anything.

Private by design means there is nothing to prevent, because there's nothing to take. Siegu runs its whole pipeline — indexing, search, face recognition, captions — on your own hardware. The “cloud” isn't where features live; it's what we avoid. That's a small difference in marketing and a huge difference in where your memories end up.

August 2026

How a search engine for one person works

Semantic search usually means uploading your library so a server can index it. Siegu does the same job with CLIP running locally through ONNX Runtime: describe a photo (“sunsets at the beach”) and it's found on your drive, not a data center.

Local AI is slower per query than a warehouse of GPUs, so the app indexes in the background and answers from a pre-computed index. You get the magic without shipping your memories anywhere.