BadPhotosOut

A native macOS app that walks your Apple Photos library, asks a local Ollama vision model to judge each photo against a free-text criterion you supply, and surfaces the flagged photos with the model's reason. No automatic deletion — you review the list and delete in Photos manually.

Nothing leaves the Mac: photos are read via PhotoKit and sent only to a local Ollama server.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this app is vibe-coded. No warranty, no support, no guarantees about correctness, performance, or your photo library. Use at your own risk — you are solely responsible for any photos you choose to delete based on what this app shows you.

Setup

1. Install Ollama and pull a vision model

brew install ollama
ollama serve   # in one terminal, leave running
ollama pull llava   # in another terminal; or any other vision model

2. Generate the Xcode project

brew install xcodegen   # if not already installed
xcodegen generate

This produces BadPhotosOut.xcodeproj.

3. Build and run

Either open the project in Xcode and hit Run, or from the command line:

xcodebuild -project BadPhotosOut.xcodeproj -scheme BadPhotosOut -configuration Debug build
open build/Debug/BadPhotosOut.app   # path may differ depending on derived data location

On first run macOS will ask for Photos access. Grant it.

4. Use it

1. In the sidebar, confirm the Ollama endpoint (http://localhost:11434) and pick a model (e.g. llava:latest). Click Test connection to populate the model dropdown.
2. Type a criterion: e.g. blurry, dark, or accidental shots.
3. Choose a scope (last N days / specific album / entire library). For a first try, scope to a small album.
4. Click Start analysis. Photos stream into the grid with a colored badge (green = keep, red = flagged, yellow = failed).
5. Click any photo to see the full image and the model's reason. Click Reveal in Photos to open Photos.app — the filename is copied to the clipboard so you can paste it into Photos' search.

Results are cached per (asset × prompt × model) under ~/Library/Containers/com.veli.badphotosout/Data/Library/Application Support/BadPhotosOut/cache.json, so re-running with the same settings is fast.

Out of scope

• No automatic deletion or moving of photos.
• No video analysis (images only).
• No multi-photo / album-level reasoning — one photo per request.
• No cloud LLMs — Ollama only.