rclip

rclip searches image folders by their visual content, so you can find photos without adding tags or importing them into a photo library. It's a local AI tool for people who keep image collections on their own computers or servers and prefer working in the terminal. It runs on Linux, Windows and Apple Silicon macOS, and it's open source under the MIT license.

Searches can use a written description, an example image, or a combination of both. You can give parts of a query more weight or subtract a concept to narrow the results, such as looking for an apple while excluding fruit. OpenCLIP's ViT-B/32 model handles text and image matching on your machine. Once the model is downloaded, local searches work offline and your photos stay on your computer. Example images can also come from a URL.

An interactive view lets you search with text and browse a thumbnail grid, with a larger image view for inspecting results. Inline previews work in terminals with Kitty graphics support, including Kitty and Ghostty. The tool also works over SSH, and its file-path output connects to Unix tools for opening or copying matching images. Image queries and combined queries use the command-line interface.

The first search builds an index; later searches reprocess only new or changed images and remove deleted files from it. Common formats include JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF and GIF. HEIC support is available on macOS and Windows when the required system codec is installed; Linux distributions don't support HEIC.