Fotusa
Photo management for anyone who misses Picasa. Find any photo by who is in it, what it shows and where it was taken — on your own Windows PC, without the internet and without the cloud.
Who, what and where
Three questions you ask of every photo. Fotusa answers them for your whole collection.
Who
Who is in it?
Fotusa recognises faces and only asks about people you named yourself: “is this Anna?” Names from Picasa come along. Type anna ben and you see the photos they are in together.
What
What does it show?
Type an ordinary word — temple, snow, black dog — and you get the photos that show it. Without anyone ever adding a tag, and any word works.
Where
Where was it?
All your photos with a location on the map. Draw a circle around an area and you see what you photographed there. Photos without a location you give a place yourself.
Works without the internet
Recognising, searching, organising and editing all happen on your own PC. Nothing from your photos leaves it: no cloud, no account, no external AI.
Fotusa only uses the internet for this:
- activating your licence, once;
- fetching the search model for searching by what a photo shows, once (2.3 GB);
- the map background — what you viewed once is kept;
- looking up a place name on the map: only that word goes out;
- renewing your licence and checking for a new version, when there is a connection;
- an error report, only when you click send — you see what is in it first.
Simple editing
No photo lab and no course needed: the things you do every day, in one or two clicks.
- Rotate
- One photo or a whole series at once, without loss of quality.
- Straighten
- A tilted horizon, or a sheet or label photographed at an angle.
- Crop and flip
- Draw a frame, apply, done.
- Auto enhance
- One click for light and contrast — or set them yourself.
- Red eyes and spots
- Remove red eyes, touch out a speck of dust or a spot.
- Fix the date
- For scans and a camera clock set wrong, also for a whole selection.
- Step by step back
- Every edit can be undone, and nothing changes until you save.
- You choose how to save
- Replace the original or add a new copy beside it. Deleting always goes through the Windows recycle bin.
Editing works on photos; RAW files and videos you edit in another program.
Why
Picasa no longer exists, and many of today’s photo managers want your photos in their cloud. A large collection soon outgrows the space you get without a subscription, and then you pay for storage every month — for as long as you want to keep your photos. Fotusa uses the disk you already have.
And money is not the only thing:
- Your work lives in their system. Names on faces and albums are not in your photos; switch, and they stay behind.
- Lose your account, lose everything. If your account is blocked, you can no longer reach your photos.
- The terms can change, and you share your storage with your mail and your phone’s backups.
- A space-saving mode stores your photos again at a smaller size.
- Without the internet you only see what is still on your device.
Fotusa has no account and never saves your photo again on its own.
Anyone who used Picasa also knows the risk: if the database goes, every name on every face goes with it.
Fotusa is made for those who miss that, and built around one rule: what you enter outlives the app. Your work sits beside your photos and inside your photos — not only in an index you can lose.
Three rules that do not bend
Your photos stay where they are
Fotusa copies nothing into storage of its own and moves nothing of its own accord. What you see is your own folder structure — the library is an index, not a store.
Your photo is never re-saved
Tags, captions and stars go into the photo file itself; a name or a location only when you choose to. The image is never recompressed in the process — Fotusa checks that after every write.
Everything stays on this computer
No cloud, no upload, no external AI. Face recognition and searching by image run on your own machine. There is no account that can see your photos; for your licence we keep only your email address, the end date and which computers it runs on.
What it does
Faces: only people you know
The app only asks about people you have named yourself: “is this Anna?” — never “who is this?” about a stranger. A yes or no takes one click; a pile of nameless faces takes weeks.
Your names from Picasa
If you used Picasa, Fotusa reads in the names you gave there. First you choose per name who it is; then the faces come as a question: “is this Anna?”. Nothing is confirmed by itself.
Through the years
Choose a person and see their faces per year, with their age. What did Anna look like in 2012, 2016, 2020? The faces and the dates are already there.
Search by what is in the picture
Type temple, snow or black dog. No list of categories that someone has to maintain — any word works, even a word nobody has ever typed before.
More like this
Right-click a photo and the app finds the photos that resemble it, closest first. From a selection of a few photos at once as well.
Search and combine
Type anna ben beach 2019 and you get the 2019 beach photos with the two of them together. anna or ben gives photos of either. A right-click excludes something instead: Thailand, but not Ben, and nothing blurry.
Filters for everything a photo tells you
RAW, JPEG, video or 360°. Out of focus or blurred by movement. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length. With or without a location, faces reviewed or not, date taken, file size. Every filter is a chip that works together with the rest.
A timeline that counts
A bar chart for every search: how many photos per year. Click a year and you see its months, click a month and you see its days. One glance shows when the trips to Thailand were, or in which year Anna was in the picture most.
Your whole collection on the map
Everything with GPS data, as patches whose colour follows how busy they are — at a glance you see where you have been, and clicking one shows the photos from that place. Or place a circle on it and drag it open to the area you are looking for: the number of photos updates as you drag.
Finding duplicates
Search by size, date taken or image, with a comparison side by side. Even across a collection of hundreds of thousands of files that is a matter of seconds, and the app stays usable in the meantime.
Importing from camera and SD card
The app keeps track of what you have already imported, so you never transfer anything twice — and that list sits beside your photos, not only in a database.
RAW files are included
Your NEF, CR2, ARW or DNG appears in the grid, is searchable by image and counts towards faces. If you shoot RAW + JPEG at the same time, you decide which of the two you see.
Albums and stars
Albums separate from your folders — a photo can be in several albums without anything moving. Stars, a slideshow or a collage of what you click.
A copy of your work every day
Seven days back, beside your photos, and if you choose, on another drive or USB stick as well.
In normal use the app runs smoothly on collections of hundreds of thousands of photos and videos. At that size the first scan takes hours and happens in the background; you can carry on working in the meantime.
Your videos are included too
Videos sit among the photos in the same grid, with a thumbnail, duration and date taken. Select a video and the panel beside it shows tools for film instead of tools for photos.
Chapters
Put a marker at 1:10 with a title — “Anna blows out the candles”. Click it and the video starts at that moment. Exactly what you need when you want to see one scene of a ten-minute clip again.
Who appears in it
Add the people who can be seen in the video, each with their own portrait. They count towards that person: click Anna on the left and this video is in her list.
Location and info
Duration, frame rate, codec and caption, and the pin on the map — many phone videos carry their own location.
Chapters and names are stored beside the video, not in it: otherwise adding a single marker would mean rewriting a file of two gigabytes. If you do want them in the file, for instance to give the film to someone, that is a separate action you choose yourself.
Where your work lives
The question that matters most once you have spent years on a collection: what do you lose if this program ceases to exist?
| What | Where it lives | Lost if Fotusa disappears? |
|---|---|---|
| Your photos | where they always were | no — that is your collection |
| Names and albums | .Fotusa - reservekopie van je werk ("backup of your work") — names per folder beside the photos, albums in the top folder | no — that is your work, everything you entered yourself |
| Tags, captions, stars — and names or places if you choose | in the photo itself (XMP) | no — they travel along to any other program |
| Index, thumbnails, vectors | .Fotusa - rekenwerk (niet aankomen) ("computed data, do not touch"), in the top folder of your photo folder | nothing of value — Fotusa calculates it again while your licence runs; not after that, so leave it alone |
A single folder of photos is therefore enough on its own to know who is in them. There is no central file you can lose.
What it does not do
- Windows 11 only — no Mac, no phone app
- No RAW developing and no video editing; searching by image skips videos
- No synchronisation — several computers work on the same folder, not on copies
- No cloud and no external AI — all recognition runs on this computer
- No account and no password — there is no place online where anyone can see your photos
Nothing from your collection leaves this PC. The only exception is looking up a place name on the map: then only that word goes out, never anything from your photos. For your licence there is one record on our server — your email address, the date your licence runs until, and the computers it is in use on; the manual explains what is and is not in it.
Not available yet
Fotusa is currently being tested extensively. As soon as a version is ready, the download will appear here. The full manual is already available.
Try it first. Without a licence Fotusa shows a thousand files from the folders you choose, including at most ten videos — with no time limit, and with those thousand everything works. If you like it, buy a licence and the rest of your collection follows.
System requirements
| Windows | Windows 11, 64-bit |
| Processor | 64-bit, 4 cores or more |
| Memory | 8 GB, 16 GB recommended |
| Graphics card | no dedicated graphics card needed |
| Disk: the program | 1 GB on the pc, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Fotusa |
| Disk: search model and maps | 5 GB in the top folder of your photo folder, once |
| Disk: per 1,000 photos | about 50 MB beside the photos, for the index, the thumbnails and the search vectors |
| Display | 1920 × 1080 or larger |
| Internet | for activation, the licence check and the one-time download of the search model; the work itself needs none |
Well above what Fotusa used on a test computer with 74,000 photos.
Already bought?
Activation happens from within the program itself: Fotusa asks for your email address and sends you a link. You do not need this site for that.
You can view your licence or withdraw a computer in the licence overview. Questions about your licence? Reply to the email you received when you bought it.