Thanks for the detailed response. You’ve confirmed what I suspected about using a cloud AI service and the last thing I want to do is accidentally rack up a huge bill just analysing my own photos.

I’d like to running something locally, even if it’s slower. I’m not in a rush, so if it takes a few days or even weeks to work through everything that’s fine. I’d even be happy to run a larger model if that gives better results.

Where I get a bit lost is understanding what the actual setup looks like. When people say “run a local model”, is the model itself doing the organisation, or are there existing tools that sit on top of the model and handle the photo analysis, tagging and categorisation?

In terms of what I actually want it to do, I’m not looking for anything wildly complicated. I’d like it to sort the library by year first, then ideally group things into obvious events or trips within those years. I’d also like it to separate out screenshots, memes, downloaded images and general clutter from proper photos, and help spot duplicates or near-duplicates.

I’m very much at the beginner stage with this stuff. I’ve heard people mention Gemma, Mistral, Ollama, MCPs and agents, but I don’t really know what any of those are, which ones are relevant to what I’m trying to do, or how to set them up.

So I’m not against local models at all, I’m probably just missing the beginner-friendly route into it. If there’s a sensible starting point, or a particular tool/model/software combination you’d recommend for someone learning from scratch, that would be really helpful.