Constraints are a design decision
Every choice a team makes to not include something is a statement about what the software is for. DawaImg is closed by design, offline by default, and not a surveillance tool by commitment.
What a closed codebase prevents
DawaImg is intentionally not open source. Not by accident, not for secrecy — and not because the team thinks the public cannot follow the reasoning behind a closed codebase. The reasoning is simple: a publicly audited, freely downloadable identity matcher is the on-ramp to surveillance. Put that matcher in a public repository and anyone with a GPU and a camera feed can wire it into a pipeline in one commit. Keeping the code closed is a deliberate, defensible choice about who gets to reuse the tool.
A closed codebase is a constraint in its own right. It means the specific implementation of detection, clustering, and provenance is not a public fork. A reimplementation from scratch is possible, but it is also a lot of work — and the shape of the tool the reimplementer would most naturally build is exactly the shape the DawaImg team is trying to keep off the market.
Not a surveillance tool, by design
The most visible misuse of face technology is continuous: live feeds, monitoring loops, alerting dashboards, “follow this person” views, the ability to set a face on watch. DawaImg ships with none of them. It works on media you already have — screenshots, camera exports, documents, video files you already possess — and returns results only when you ask. There is no primitive in the UI to point the tool at a moving crowd, and there is no feature surface that suggests it should be there.
Post-capture, offline review is what the app is actually designed around. Not watching, not tracking, not alerting. Looking at what has already been recorded, on your own machine, for a specific case you are trying to understand. The word “offline” is doing real work in this product, and it is not a limitation — it is a commitment.
Use it the way it’s meant
Free, offline, for good-faith review. Windows & macOS.
No identity, no name database
Many face products ship with preloaded name databases, or frame the goal as “tell me whose face this is.” DawaImg is not that kind of tool. It groups similar faces together and records where each one comes from — which file, which frame, which page. It does not attach names to faces, and it does not ship with a database of anyone. A closed codebase and no identity claims go together because they refuse the same underlying question from two sides at once.
A closed codebase that also has no identity layer is a stronger position against misuse than either alone. There is no public matcher to clone, and no public directory it can be pointed at. Two missing pieces where most “recognition” products put their center of gravity. The software is deliberately two steps short of a surveillance tool, and that is the design.
Our responsible-use commitments
DawaImg is free, offline, and requires no account. Those are not compromises made to hit a price point — they are the shape of the product. Free means a journalist, a private investigator, or a researcher can run a real case without a card on file, and without anyone collecting payment data that could later be correlated with the work itself. Offline means nothing you import is required to leave your machine. No accounts means there is no profile to attach a case to, and no one holds a list of who is using the tool and on what media.
Our commitment is simple: if we ever add a feature, the first question we ask is whether it widens the gap between a reviewer pointing at a specific case file and a surveillance operator pointing at a street. If it does, we do not add it. Keeping the code closed, refusing surveillance features, and holding the no-identity line are all expressions of that same commitment to good-faith use. It is what the software is for — and the reason none of the shortcuts are shipped.