Phokus is a local-first desktop media library for Windows — point it at
your image and video folders and it builds a fast, searchable gallery with
thumbnails, semantic search, visual discovery, AI tagging, and duplicate
cleanup. Everything is processed on your machine; nothing is uploaded.
0.2.0 is the biggest update since launch: albums, gallery multi-select with
bulk actions, colour search, a second AI tagging model (JoyTag), a full tag
manager, camera EXIF details in the lightbox, a slideshow mode, and a large
batch of performance and theme fixes. Updating from 0.1.x? The built-in
updater will fetch this for you — and afterwards, a new in-app "What's New"
tour shows you around.
Install / update
- Updating from 0.1.x: the in-app updater will offer 0.2.0 on launch — one
click downloads, installs, and relaunches. - Fresh install: download
Phokus_0.2.0_x64-setup.exebelow and run it.
Windows SmartScreen will warn that the publisher is unrecognized — this
build is not code-signed. Click More info → Run anyway. - Requires Windows 10/11. WebView2 is fetched automatically if missing.
NVIDIA users wanting GPU embedding/tagging speed can use the
Phokus_0.2.0_x64-cuda-setup.exe variant instead (larger download; bundles the
CUDA runtime DLLs). Settings → Updates now shows which build you are running.
Highlights
Added
- Albums — cross-folder collections without moving files: their own
sidebar section with cover thumbnails, create/rename/reorder/manage, and
album-aware similar-image search. - Gallery multi-select — hover a thumbnail's corner to start selecting,
then bulk tag, rate, favorite, add to an album, or delete from a floating
action bar. Works in similar-image, region, and album views too. - Colour search — filter the Gallery, Timeline, or tag results by dominant
colour via toolbar swatches or a custom picker. - Choose your tagging model — pick between the anime-focused WD tagger and
JoyTag (better for photo libraries), each with its own confidence
threshold, plus a Reset AI tags action that never touches manual tags. - Tag manager — rename, merge, and delete tags across the library, with
live search and sorting; Explore's Tag Cloud also shows related tags on
hover. - Camera info in the lightbox — EXIF camera, lens, aperture, shutter
speed, ISO, focal length, and a map link for geotagged photos. - Slideshow mode, What's New tour after updates, quick theme switch
from the title bar, an editable path bar in the folder picker, persistent
per-folder worker pauses, and add-to-album from the right-click menu.
Changed
- Settings reorganised into General, Media, Updates & Setup, Storage, and
AI Workspace pages. - Menus unified — all context menus and dropdowns share one style, stay on
screen, close on Escape, and support submenus. - Faster Explore — quicker cluster revisits, much faster first-time
clustering on large libraries, and a calmer Tag Cloud during active tagging. - Faster CPU tagging (multi-core with headroom) and smoother GPU tagging.
- Safer deletion — deleting media now asks for confirmation and says
clearly that files are removed from disk. - Better narrow-window layouts, a real update download progress bar, and a
two-column lightbox info panel.
Fixed
- No more self-indexing loops — Phokus now skips its own thumbnail cache
when you add a broad folder like your user profile. - Ratings keep your search order — rating an image mid-search no longer
reshuffles similar-image, region, semantic, tag, or album results. - AI tagging stays responsive — big GPU tagging jobs no longer freeze the
UI, and noisy low-signal tags are filtered (older ones cleaned up on
startup). - First launch now fits smaller screens, Explore no longer flashes the
previous folder, and a long list of Subtle Light readability fixes.
See the changelog
for the full list.
Checksums
SHA-256 (Phokus_0.2.0_x64-setup.exe) = 9d52b485ef0d614620b0df4ba235fbdf285e0792e4a38841777e0f0a05f38770
SHA-256 (Phokus_0.2.0_x64-cuda-setup.exe) = b3a24ea5fb9f00f64fe5b4040a69347b91341c75eb83fd7bb2409cc74c5eb052