What it does
Built for libraries that outgrew the shared drive.
We get it. You might be a photographer, a business or a drone pilot with hundreds of thousands of images — or maybe it is the 19,540 photographs on your phone you have been meaning to sort out, and it is just totally out of hand. You can no longer find anything. Long-forgotten folders. All of it. We understand: that is how VisualIQ was born. We use it too.
Familiar
Nobody needs training to use it.
Everything you already do to files on your own computer, you do here, with the same hand movements. Drag things onto other things. Right-click for the menu. Shift-click a range. The point of a library is that people use it, and people use what they already know.
- Drag and drop, everywhere it would make sense. Files and whole folders onto an album, photographs onto an album in the panel beside you, albums onto each other to reorganise. Where you drop it is how you said which one.
- Right-click any photograph for open, details, edit, download the original, add to the download basket, and delete — the menu you expected to find, with the items you expected in it.
- Options you cannot use are greyed, not hidden — and clicking one tells you who can, rather than leaving you wondering where it went.
- Edit without leaving the page. Title, description, tags, owner, photographer and the date it was taken, in a box over the grid you were already looking at.
- Select the way you select files. Click, shift-click a run, or take a whole search at once.
Ingest
Uploads that tell you the truth.
The old library made you guess whether a 4 GB video had arrived. This one shows every file, every stage, and what happens next — and picks up where it left off if the connection drops.
- Chunked and resumable. Close the laptop mid-upload; open it later and carry on.
- Drop straight onto an album — including onto one in the folder panel beside the page you are already looking at. Dropping on it is how you said which one.
- A folder becomes an album of the same name. The structure you already built is the structure that arrives.
- Per-file progress and state. Uploading, processing, thumbnailing, tagging, done — and a light in the header that keeps counting while you go back to work.
- Video handled properly. Posters, previews and durations generated with FFmpeg.
- Nothing silently fails. A file that can't be read says so, with a reason you can act on.
Intelligence
Every asset describes itself.
On arrival, each image and video frame is read and described — subjects, setting, conditions, activity — and the camera's own metadata is pulled apart into fields you can filter on. Your team searches in plain words; the library already speaks them.
This is the part that makes the folder tree optional. When every asset can describe itself, where it happens to sit stops being the thing that finds it.
- Descriptive tags with confidence scores, reviewable and editable — the machine suggests, your people decide.
- Full EXIF extraction — camera, lens, exposure, capture time, dimensions, colour profile.
- Dominant colour extraction, so “the teal one” is an actual search.
- One box searches all of it at once — tags, captions, filenames, camera, photographer, place and colour — across every album, and across the ones filed nowhere at all.
- Applies to new uploads. Existing tags are never overwritten — backfill older assets only when you choose to.
Suggested tags
- Camera
- Nikon Z8 · NIKKOR Z 14-30mm ƒ/4 S
- Exposure
- ƒ/5.6 · 1/60 · ISO 800 · 14 mm
- Captured
- 2026-05-04 09:12:47 AEST
- Size
- 8256 × 5504 · 51.2 MB · NEF
- Colour
- #3E6F4E · #8FA98C
Credit
Who took it, still on it in ten years.
The name of the person who took a photograph is the first thing lost when a library is copied between drives, and the first thing wanted when something is about to be published. It is a field here, not a convention somebody has to keep up.
- Photographers are records, not logins. A freelancer who has never signed in still has a name, an email, a phone number and a website on file.
- Their name opens their card — everything on their record, for anybody who can see the asset. Nobody has to ask an administrator for a photographer's email.
- Searchable. One name returns everything they shot, across every album.
- Credit a whole day at once. A morning's photographs almost always come from one person — select them and set it once, which is the only reason credits ever get recorded.
- Name
- A. Whitfield
- Business
- Whitfield Photography
- Role
- Photographer
- studio@example.com
- Phone
- 04xx xxx xxx
- Website
- example.com
Place
Where it was taken, on a map.
Coordinates come straight out of the file, and you can re-read them from the original at any time — one asset or ten thousand — without touching the ones that are already right. “Everything we have of the headland” is a place on a map, not a folder somebody has to have made.
- Map view of the whole library. Pins that are close together group into one numbered circle as you zoom out, and open as a gallery when the map will go no closer.
- Search the map. A keyword, or an address with a radius around it, or both — the same search language the results page uses, so a query means the same thing on either screen.
- On-demand GPS re-extraction from the original file — individually or in bulk.
- Set location by hand where the camera never recorded one, and apply it across a selection.
- Nothing is bulk-overwritten. A coordinate that is already right is left alone, whatever else is being re-read.
- Search
- “jetty” within 5 km of an address
- Selected
- Parks and reserves · 731 assets
- Coordinates
- -41.2044, 145.0181
- Missing GPS
- 96 assets — re-extract from originals
Scale
Fix a thousand as easily as one.
Most of the work in a library is the same small correction, repeated. So selecting is a mode rather than a tick box on every picture: turn it on, and the photographs themselves become the control.
- Select across a whole search, not just the page you can see — then set the place, the album, the owner, the photographer, or add and remove tags, in one action.
- Or fix one, where you found it. Right-click a photograph and edit its title, description, tags, owner, photographer and capture date without leaving the grid.
- The library tells you what is missing. No location, no title, no tags, or a place inherited from the album rather than the camera — counted, and one click from the selection that fixes them.
- Delete is offered only where it will work — over your own assets, or anything at all if you administer the library. The server checks every one again on arrival; the browser never decides what somebody may do.
- Nothing is gone. Deleted assets sit in a recycle bin — yours, and an organisation-wide one — for as long as you say.
Worth fixing
- No location
- 96 assets
- Album-default position only
- 203 assets
- No title
- 41 assets
- No tags
- 12 assets
Control
Share deliberately. Administer completely.
Nothing in VisualIQ is public by accident. An album leaves the organisation only when somebody creates a share link for it, and that link can expire.
- Private share links for albums, with expiry and revocation — everything else needs a login.
- Email the link from here rather than copying it into a message and hoping it survived the paste.
- Roles that make sense: viewer, contributor, administrator — and every permission adjustable one person at a time.
- Write to your people from inside the library. Everybody, or a few — a proper message with formatting, sent and logged, so “we are archiving the 2019 albums on Friday” does not have to go out through somebody's personal mailbox.
- Administrators see everything in their organisation — every user, every asset, every share.
- Your own address and branding — yourorg.visualiq.au, your logo, your colour.
https://yourorg.visualiq.au/s/9f4c-2a7e-bd10
Questions
The things people ask first.
Can we bring our existing library in?
Drag your folder tree onto the upload page and it arrives as albums of the same names, nested as it is on your computer. Originals are stored byte-for-byte — nothing is re-encoded on the way in — and each one is read, tagged and indexed as it lands.
What does not come across on its own is anything held in another system's database rather than in the files: its tags, captions, user accounts and share links. There is no import tool for those. If that is what you are facing, tell us what you are on and we will say honestly what would be involved rather than guess at it here.
Do we still need our folder structure?
No — and that is the part worth sitting with, because it is a habit rather than a feature. A folder tree only works while everybody files the same way and remembers the convention, and it quietly fails the moment a photograph could reasonably live in three places or the person who built the tree moves on.
Here, every asset is read on arrival and describes itself: what is in it, where it was taken, what colour it is, who took it, what the camera was. One search box reads all of that at once, across the whole library. Albums are still there, and plenty of people like them — for a job, a shoot, an event, a thing being sent to somebody. They are just no longer what finding depends on, which is exactly what makes it safe to be casual about them.
So how do people actually find things?
They describe what they are after. “Aerial shot of the wharf at dusk” finds it whether it was filed under Events, Coast or nothing at all. Beyond words: by dominant colour, by drawing a radius around an address on the map, by photographer, by camera or lens, by date range, by file type — and any of those combined. Searches people run often can be saved and shared with the team.
Will our people have to learn something new?
Not for the everyday parts. Drag files and folders in, drag photographs onto an album, drag albums about to reorganise. Right-click a photograph and the menu has what you expected in it: open, details, edit, download the original, add to the download basket, delete. Click and shift-click to select a run, as you would in any file manager. The things that are genuinely new — the search language, the map, bulk edits — are the things worth learning.
What does the tagging actually do?
It looks at each new image, and frames from each video, and writes descriptive tags — subjects, setting, conditions — each with a confidence score. It suggests; your people confirm, edit or remove. It runs on new uploads by default, and on older assets only when you ask it to, so existing tagging work is never trampled.
Does it handle video, or just photos?
Both. Video gets a poster frame, a scrub preview, duration and format metadata, and the same tagging and search treatment as stills. Large 4K files upload in resumable chunks.
Our GPS data is a mess. Is that fixable?
It is. You can re-extract coordinates from the original files on demand — one asset, a selection, or the whole library — and set locations by hand where the camera never recorded one. Assets with correct coordinates are left alone.
Can we record who took each photograph?
Yes, and a photographer does not need an account to be credited. Each one is a record with a name, business, role, email, phone, website and social links; their name on an asset opens that card for anybody who can see it, a search for them returns everything they shot, and a whole day's photographs can be credited to one person in a single action.
How do we fix a library that is already a mess?
The library counts its own gaps — assets with no location, no title, no tags, or a position inherited from their album rather than their camera. Each count is a link to exactly those assets, and from there you select them and set the missing thing once. Most tidying up is one correction repeated a thousand times, so that is the part that is built.
Somebody is leaving. What happens to their work?
Hand it over in one step: their assets, and the folders and albums they made, move to whoever takes the role on. Nothing is orphaned and nothing has to be re-uploaded, which is the usual way a library loses a year of somebody's work.
Does any of it need JavaScript?
Browsing, searching, opening an asset, editing it, sharing it and administering the library all work without it — the forms are real forms and the links are real links. Scripts make things nicer: the justified gallery, the lightbox, drag and drop, the right-click menu, selecting several at once. It matters for accessibility audits, for locked-down corporate browsers, and for the day something fails to load.
Can we use our own domain?
Every organisation gets yourorg.visualiq.au on signup. Custom domains are available on the Organisation and Enterprise plans.