Search by describing what you see. Recognize faces. Find duplicates. Read text in screenshots. Searchy is a native photo manager with semantic search built in — entirely on-device, no cloud, no subscription.
brew install --cask ausafmo/searchy/searchy
The DMG is unsigned — right-click → Open on first launch, then allow in System Settings → Privacy & Security.
CLIP encodes images and queries into the same embedding space. Search "dog on a beach" — it finds dogs on beaches, even if the file is IMG_4392.jpg.
Extracts text from screenshots, documents, signs. Hybrid mode blends semantic similarity with text matching — adjustable OCR weight for tuning relevance.
DeepFace with ArcFace detects and clusters faces automatically. Name people, pin favorites, merge duplicates, create face albums. Search by name.
Visual similarity scoring with adjustable threshold (85–99%). Auto-select smaller duplicates, preview before deleting, bulk cleanup.
⌘⇧Space summons a floating search window anywhere. Fully keyboard-navigable — ⌘1-9 to copy+paste, Ctrl+1-9 to clipboard, Enter to paste.
Select any photo to find visually similar ones across your library using CLIP embeddings. Great for finding variations or related shots.
Auto-index watched folders as new images appear with regex filters. Index external USB drives and disks separately. Incremental — only processes new files.
Multiple CLIP models to choose from — switch without re-indexing. Auto-unloads after idle to free RAM/GPU, reloads from disk cache on next search.
All processing on-device. No network requests after initial model download. CORS restricted to localhost, server binds to 127.0.0.1. Built-in update checker via Homebrew. Security audit.
Free, open source, private. The photo manager your Mac deserves.