OneFolder

- 12/2021

Visit onefolder.app

The Initial Spark

Our family has pictures dating back to the 1880s. Some are well over a century old, and we wanted to preserve not just the photos themselves but also the information about them: who’s in each picture, when and where it was taken, and why it mattered.

We tried storing everything on Google Drive, iCloud, and Nextcloud, but those services kept pushing us into strict folder hierarchies. Meanwhile, Google Photos didn’t feel future-proof—we worried it might change drastically or disappear in 10 years.

We needed a long-lasting way to organize pictures, annotate them, and (most importantly) share them with future generations. We felt an urgency because a lot of that knowledge was stored in our grandmother’s memory.

Being developers, we assumed this would be easy—surely there was already a tool out there that did exactly what we needed. But after experimenting with dozens of sync apps and clouds, we realized it might be easier to build something ourselves.

December 2021

We began sketching what would eventually become OneFolder: a “local Google Photos” where you own your data and tag images without relying on a single cloud service. We toyed with file naming conventions, metadata (like EXIF/IPTC), and tested alternatives like PhotoPrism.

August 2023

We formalized the idea into something we initially called PhotoFolder. The core concept: a local-first app reminiscent of Obsidian for text notes, but for pictures. We wanted it to run entirely offline, with optional sync to any storage you trust—no forced folder rules, no ephemeral cloud dependencies.

October 2023

Our first PhotoFolder version debuted. We made a quick video showcasing basic features:

• Detecting duplicates
• Tagging and sorting photos by date
• Keeping everything on your machine

We shared this video online in places like Dense Discovery and the Obsidian subreddit. The response was surprisingly positive; we got a spike in sign-ups and encouraging messages.

November 2023

We kept refining the MVP. Nico proposed a new flower logo. We loved it and made it official.

Around this time, we also discovered a partially abandoned open-source codebase (“Allusion”). It already did much of what we wanted, so we decided to fork it and adapt it. That’s how PhotoFolder gradually evolved into OneFolder.

December 2023

We started preparing email invites for early-access testers and gathered feature requests. A handful of people tried our pre-release builds, excited by the idea of a local-first solution that could unify their archives—from modern smartphone shots to century-old scans.

The holidays, of course, slowed us down a bit, but we still had brainstorming sessions about face detection, advanced tagging, and how to capture the family history details that motivated the entire project.

January 2024

We pushed out small bug fixes and listened closely to user feedback. Some wanted easier metadata editing for scanned photos; others just wanted a simpler interface. Progress wasn’t as fast as we hoped (travel and family commitments intervened), but the core idea remained strong—preserving important pictures and stories for the long run.

February – July 2024

We split our time between OneFolder and other income-generating projects. Even so, we managed to add notable features, like HEIC support for iPhone photos. We also streamlined our build pipeline for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In the background, we explored whether a real-time sync or “cloud option” might be viable—but we chose to stabilize our basic feature set first.

August – September 2024

We shipped monthly improvements and saw a steady trickle of new users. Some found us by word-of-mouth, others stumbled on our GitHub page or video. We quietly tracked engagement, noticing a dedicated group who kept using OneFolder to catalog old family albums.

January 2025

Despite a gap without major releases, OneFolder held onto its core community. People continued sending feedback on new ideas (like PDF handling or more advanced duplicate detection), reminding us the need for local-first, open-format archiving was still there. With our other projects stable, we decided to give OneFolder renewed attention—we couldn’t shake the spark that started it all.

Looking Ahead

From the start, OneFolder has been about preserving history, whether it’s old family portraits from the 1880s or last summer’s reunion photos. We want a flexible, local-first tool that any generation can pick up—without worrying a corporation might shutter the service one day.

Thank you to everyone who’s believed in OneFolder since those first demos. Stay tuned as we keep evolving it to help families, archivists, and anyone who wants their photos to truly last.