Building a searchable photo library on the Neon backend with TanStack

Atlas is a TanStack Start photo-library application hosted on Vercel that demonstrates how Neon’s backend services can support private uploads, user authentication, and search by text, similar image, or face. It stores original images and face crops in private S3-compatible object storage, uses short-lived presigned URLs for access, and records metadata, ownership, captions, CLIP embeddings, and face descriptors in Lakebase Postgres. Managed Better Auth supplies authenticated user identities, while server-side checks scope every operation to the signed-in owner. Text and image similarity searches use CLIP vectors and Lakebase Search’s ANN indexing, while facial search uses browser-based face detection and descriptors grouped into people through clustering. A central feature is Neon branching, which creates isolated preview environments containing copy-on-write database data, private objects, authentication sessions, and search indexes, allowing developers to test changes against realistic production-like libraries without copying data or affecting production.

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