https://denzyldick.github.io/siegu/ 2026-09-01T00:00:00Z Thoughts on building a private, local-first photo library: why private by design beats a privacy policy, how on-device AI works, and more from the Siegu project. Siegu https://denzyldick.github.io/siegu/blog.html#private-by-design 2026-09-01T00:00:00Z 2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

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.

https://denzyldick.github.io/siegu/blog.html#search-engine-for-one-person 2026-08-01T00:00:00Z 2026-08-01T00:00:00Z

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.