Where the sorting runs decides the rest.
Tools that sort footage by person split into two kinds: ones that run on your computer and ones that run in the cloud. The recognition itself is similar either way. The difference is everything around it - and that is what actually decides which one fits your work.
Footage volume
Bounded by the machine in front of you. A full wedding or a multi-camera game is tens to hundreds of gigabytes; a laptop or a mid-range desktop chews through that slowly, and thermal throttling makes the last hour slower than the first.
Bounded by upload bandwidth, not local compute. Once the footage is up, a shoot's worth of scanning runs on hardware sized for it. Tabor8 scans on cloud GPUs, so a large project finishes in the same order of time as a small one.
Machine contention
The computer doing the recognition is usually the same one you edit on. An overnight scan is fine; a scan you need to run during the day means you are not cutting while it runs.
Processing happens off your machine entirely. You can start a scan and keep editing, shooting, or shut the laptop - the job does not live on it.
Setup and hardware
A capable GPU, a working driver stack, and enough disk headroom for the source plus the output. When it works it is fast; when a driver update breaks it, that is your afternoon.
A browser and an account. Nothing to install, no GPU to buy or keep current. The trade is that you are dependent on a connection and a service being up.
Delivery and hand-off
The sorted result is a folder structure on one disk. Getting it to a client or a second editor is a separate step - another upload, a transfer service, a shipped drive.
The sorted output already lives somewhere shareable. Tabor8 gives a revocable link per project or per person that opens with no account at the other end, so delivery is not a second export.
Working offline
Fully offline once the footage is on the disk. If you routinely work somewhere with no usable internet, this matters more than anything else on this list.
Needs a connection to upload and to review results. The upload is the slow part; after that the work is light.
Where the footage and face data sit
Everything stays on hardware you physically control. For some client contracts and some jurisdictions that is the simplest answer to give.
Footage and the face-recognition step sit with the provider. That puts the weight on their retention, access and deletion model - worth reading before you upload a client's footage. Tabor8's is written up in its Privacy & Biometrics Notice, and its region and consent handling is deliberately conservative.
The honest summary
Desktop wins when you work offline, when footage must never leave hardware you control, or when you already own a strong GPU and a stable stack. Cloud wins when footage volume is large, when the processing machine is also your edit machine, and when the sorted output has to travel to a client or a collaborator.
Tabor8 is a cloud tool, built for the second case: a professional shoot, processed without tying up the edit bay, delivered as share links rather than a shipped drive.
Next: what to look for in a tool that sorts footage by person - the checklist, once you have picked a side of this line.