rclip

rclip searches folders by what their images contain, without requiring tags or a separate photo library. It's for people who keep image collections on their own computers or servers and want to search them from a terminal.

• Text and image search: Find images with a written description or an example image from a local file or URL.
• Combined queries: Mix text and image queries, weight individual parts, or subtract concepts to narrow the results.
• Visual browsing: Search with text in an interactive thumbnail grid or preview results inline in terminals that support Kitty graphics.
• Incremental indexing: Reprocess new and changed images on later searches and remove deleted files from the index.
• Terminal workflows: Search over SSH and pass matching file paths to Unix tools for tasks such as opening or copying images.

rclip is open source under the MIT license. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, with macOS support limited to Apple Silicon. OpenCLIP's ViT-B/32 model performs text and image matching locally. After the model download, searches of local files work offline and photos stay on your computer; image queries that use a URL need network access.

The interactive interface requires Kitty graphics with Unicode-placeholder support. Image queries and combined queries use the command-line interface. Supported formats include JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF and GIF. HEIC works on macOS and Windows when the required system codec is installed; Linux distributions of rclip don't support HEIC.