Draku: Exorcising the Ghosts in Your Camera Roll with Offline Open-Weight AI 🦇

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

You are standing at the pharmacy counter. The pharmacist asks for your prescription. You know it is on your phone—somewhere between 4,000 WhatsApp forwards, food photos, and old boarding passes. You scroll past IMG-20261011-WA0004.jpg, Screenshot_2026-09-14.png, and scan_final_v2.pdf.

Screenshots are the most-used notebook on earth that nobody calls a notebook. The problem is that a screenshot stores pixels, not meaning. And inside those pixels live four kinds of digital ghosts haunting every laptop and phone:

Meet Draku —a fluffy black cat with crimson bat wings and eyes full of black flames. He sees everything on your device, and he tells no one.

Draku is a 100% offline, open-source desktop application (built with Tauri) that reads every screenshot, photo, and PDF in a folder once using local PaddleOCR and Google's open-weight EmbeddingGemma, turning that single reading into four concrete outcomes:

Zero bytes uploaded. Zero accounts. Zero settings screens.

Every capture below is recorded directly from the real desktop application on Windows with Wi-Fi off and Airplane Mode visibly enabled —no cloud calls, no mockups, no staged telemetry. The full airplane-mode walkthrough script lives in the repo as DEMO.md.

Local PaddleOCR extracts the text, a structured rule-reader extracts human naming cues, and Google's EmbeddingGemma-300M embeds the reading into a 768-dimensional local vector. Type "internet password" and the router login surface appears immediately—pure meaning match with zero keyword overlap.

Dates are extracted alongside their surrounding contextual words, allowing Draku to recognize that "Warranty ends in 6 days" or "Refill by 10 Nov" is an actionable deadline rather than an old receipt date. One click generates an RFC-compliant.ics calendar file accepted by your system calendar—no cloud sync intermediary.

PaddleOCR returns exact pixel bounding boxes for sensitive ID numbers, card digits, and credentials. Clicking "Make a safe copy" burns irreversible pixelation blur directly into new pixel buffers and strips hidden EXIF location metadata. The original document remains untouched.

Before and after, side by side — the sensitive ID number and GPS coordinates visible in the first frame are permanently eradicated in the safe copy:

Expired boarding passes, old OTP screenshots, and blurry duplicates earn transparent, inspectable "dead file" scores with human-readable explanations. Clicking "Set aside" lays them to rest in.draku/rest/ —never deleted, completely reversible with one-tap Undo.

Draku is a free, open-source, on-device AI file manager for Windows. It reads every screenshot, photo and PDF on your machine — it finds what you need warns you before a date passes, hides what should stay private, and lets go of what is dead. Nothing leaves your machine.

Built for Hacktoberfest 2026 · Week 4 — Ghost in the Machine.