Meowfolio: I Built an AI Scrapbook for the Cats You Meet Outside 🐱🌿

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

There's a difference between seeing a cat and knowing a cat.

The first time, it's just an orange cat sitting outside a shop. The next time, you recognize its face. Eventually, you start looking for it whenever you walk down that street.

And then, somehow, this random neighborhood cat becomes part of your day.

For this week's Touch Grass challenge, I wanted to build something around the little things we notice when we actually go outside. Not another productivity dashboard, fitness tracker, or AI chatbot.

Meowfolio is a private, browser-based scrapbook for the cats you meet outside, powered by open-weight computer vision running locally in your browser.

The idea is simple: every neighborhood cat deserves a little page in your memories.

You take a photograph, let AI find the cat, give it a name, and save that encounter. The next time you meet that cat, you can add another sighting to its profile.

Over time, these ordinary encounters become a personal scrapbook of the animals you've met.

Each cat gets its own scrapbook page, complete with a chronological history and photographs.

My Meowfolio collection. Every cat gets its own little corner of the internet, stored privately in my browser.

I also built a Story Studio that turns saved photographs into 1080×1920 story cards. There are three visual themes, adjustable photo framing, and local PNG export.

And because running AI models on a phone isn't always convenient, there's a Save Photo for Later feature. You can capture the moment now and process the photograph when you have time.

I wanted the interface to feel like something you might have discovered on the internet in 2003.

So Meowfolio has pink pixel windows, chunky borders, old-school buttons, Polaroid-inspired photographs, and a little pixel-cat mascot.

A scrapbook should feel like a place where you keep things that matter to you, even if they seem insignificant to everyone else.

The cat is the reason to go outside. The app is just where the memory lives.

Meowfolio runs directly in your browser. There's no account to create, no application to install, and no API key to configure.

Reload the website, and your saved memories should still be there in the same browser.

You can also save an unprocessed photograph to your local inbox, add another encounter to a saved cat, export a story card, or download a private backup of your collection.

I tested the end-to-end application on my Android phone, and the test passed successfully. That was an especially satisfying milestone because Meowfolio is meant to be used while you're out exploring, not just demonstrated on a desktop.

One limitation worth mentioning: the first model download requires internet access. Afterward, the browser can reuse cached model assets, although browser caches are not guaranteed to persist forever.

Meowfolio is open source, and the complete implementation is available on GitHub.

A private, pixel-pink scrapbook for the cats you meet outside. Powered by real open-weight computer vision that runs in your browser, not on a photo-upload server.

Try Meowfolio ↗ · How it works · Try it yourself · Architecture · Testing · Touch Grass challenge

There's a cat you see near the corner shop. Another that always sleeps under the same tree. You photograph them, forget which one was which, and keep walking.

Meowfolio gives those tiny encounters a place to live. Take a photo on your walk, let local AI find the cat, name it, and build a personal history one sighting at a time.

Meowfolio was built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge · Week 1: Touch Grass. The idea is to make looking up from your phone more rewarding—not…