Does an app already exist that can automatically sort graduation photos by person?

[christiangarleo]

I'm looking for software that can organize hundreds of graduation/event photos into folders for each person.

Some photos contain diplomas with names, which could be used to identify and group the surrounding photos.

Before building my own solution, I'd rather use or adapt something that already exists.

Does anyone know an app, GitHub project, or AI tool that does this or something similar?

Open source, paid, cloud-based — all suggestions welcome!

[evachxji]

Yes—but there are two separate problems here:

1. OCR: reading a graduate's name from a diploma.
2. Face recognition/clustering: finding photos that contain the same person.

PaddleOCR addresses the first problem, not the second. A name extracted from a diploma does not, by itself, identify the faces in other photos.

For a no-code or low-code starting point, a photo manager such as Immich already supports facial recognition: it groups detected faces into people, lets you assign names and merge clusters, and can show the assets associated with each person. Its documented workflow organizes photos inside Immich; creating physical per-person folders would be a separate export or automation step.

If the folders must be named automatically from the diplomas, I would expect a small custom pipeline:

1. Back up the originals and run face detection/clustering across the whole collection.
2. Review and name the resulting people/clusters. Do not assume every cluster is correct, especially for small faces, side profiles, or similar-looking graduates.
3. Run PaddleOCR on clear diploma photos and normalize the extracted names against a graduation roster if one is available.
4. Use a diploma photo as a named anchor only when it unambiguously shows the corresponding graduate and the OCR result has been validated.
5. Match the other photos through face similarity—not merely because they were taken immediately before or after the diploma photo.
6. Export copies or hard links into per-person folders. Put ambiguous matches in a review folder, and decide separately how to handle group photos.

So the practical recommendation is:

• If grouping inside a photo manager is enough: try Immich on a small subset first.
• If you need physical folders named from diploma text: combine OCR with face clustering and manual review; OCR alone is not sufficient.

For student photos, local processing and appropriate consent are also worth considering.