All your photos, on your own machine, findable.

Search by what is in the picture

Type it: cows, birthday cake, receipt. Every photo is turned into a vector by SigLIP 2, a model trained to put an image and a sentence describing it close together, and a search is the photos nearest to what you typed. It reads German as well as English: kühe auf der weide works.

It runs on your CPU through ONNX Runtime: about 0.1 s per photo to index on a laptop, and a few tens of milliseconds per query. Results come by relevance; one switch orders the same matches by date.

More like this one

Press s on a picture of a sheep and you get the other sheep. Find similar is the photos nearest to another photo, and it is a filter like any other, similar:1234, so it combines with everything else: similar:1234 2023 is the ones from that year.

The words in a picture

text:rechnung lists every photo and video with that word in it: a letter, a receipt, a sign, a screenshot, a slide in a video. The info panel shows what was read, with your words marked, and Copy text puts all of it on the clipboard.

PaddleOCR reads it on the CPU, umlauts and ß included, and nothing leaves the machine. Screenshots and saved pictures are read first, because that is where the text is.

The same person

The info panel shows the faces in a photo. Click one and you get every other picture with that person in it, closest first. It is a filter too, face:5678, so face:5678 2019 is that person in 2019.

Nobody is named and nothing is grouped ahead of time: a face model on your CPU turns each face into a vector, and the list is the faces nearest to the one you clicked. Its weights are licensed for non-commercial use only.

The dates are in the files

A file manager sorting by "created" sees when a file landed on your disk, not when it was taken: after a sync, the same second for twenty thousand photos. The real capture time is inside each file, usually with the time zone it was taken in. meerpic reads it, falls back to the file name, then to the file time, and remembers which it used, so a photo dated by guesswork says so. On a real library:

A map, and places offline

The map (M) shows every photo with a position, clustered, with a thumbnail per cluster. Pan to a place and press Show in grid for the photos in view, or type in:potsdam. Coordinates become town, region and country with a copy of GeoNames that ships with the agent: no geocoding service sees where you have been. The map tiles are the one thing the browser fetches from elsewhere, and the tile server is a setting.

Every folder, one timeline

Point it at as many folders as you keep photos in: the phone's library, a folder of camera imports. They show as one timeline, newest first. Each folder has a name, so it can move on disk without a re-index.

Indexing goes newest first too: the last few days are browsable within a minute, searchable a little after, and the rest fills in behind. The first index is the expensive part; after that, only new photos cost anything.

iPhone videos that play

An iPhone records HEVC, which no browser on Linux decodes. The agent runs a full ffmpeg and gives every video an H.264 copy at 720p, tone-mapped from the iPhone's HDR, so it plays everywhere. On a real library the copies came out at 5 to 10% of the originals' size, and the original is untouched and one click away.

Rest the pointer on a video and it plays in place, muted. Until its copy exists, moving across the tile flicks through ten frames from the whole clip, so a ten-minute video is as quick to check as a ten-second one.

One moment, one photo

A Live Photo arrives as a HEIC and a two-second MOV. Shown naively, every moment appears twice. meerpic pairs them: the still is the photo, and the motion plays when you rest on its LIVE badge. An edited photo arrives as a second file, IMG_1925-edited.heic; as in Photos, the edit is what the grid shows and the original is one click behind it. On the library above:

Into a mail, as a JPEG

Once it is in your library, the photo you just took is top-left. Drag it out of the desktop app into a mail and the mail gets a real file: the original when it is a JPEG, a JPEG made from it when the phone wrote HEIC, because the person you are writing to may not be on an Apple device. In a browser tab, c copies it and d downloads the JPEG. One setting takes the GPS position out of everything you hand over.

Delete that shows its work

The dialog lists every file move before it happens, one per file, and only that list runs. Files go to a trash folder in the library, emptied after 30 days. Deleting only happens on this computer: a photo synced from iCloud stays in iCloud and on your iPhone, because rclone can read iCloud Photos but not change them, and the next sync does not bring it back.

The server never changes a photo

meerpic splits in two, the way meercal and meerail do. The agent does the work: it walks the library, reads the metadata with exiftool, draws thumbnails, converts videos and runs rclone when you press Sync. The server is the web layer: it reads the database and leaves a note for the agent when you want something done. Nothing is ever written to a photo.

Pictures you did not want

is:nsfw lists what a classifier made for exactly this scores as explicit, most certain first, and it looks at the pictures apps saved before anything else. Those tiles are blurred until the pointer is on them. It runs on your CPU, and it is a ranking, not a verdict: look before you delete. When it is wrong, n marks a photo safe.

Everything in PostgreSQL

One row per file, with where it is, when and where it was taken and what took it; one search vector per photo, in pgvector beside everything else; the albums; the deletes. Every column is derived from the file and can be rebuilt, and every file in the cache can be deleted and will be made again. make psql gives you a shell on it.

Keyboard first, light and dark

Full keyboard control, from search to delete, and ? lists every key. Light and dark, following the system or pinned.

3. Let it index

The agent starts at once, newest first: the last few days are browsable within a minute, searchable a little after, and the rest fills in behind. Videos get their playable copies once everything has a thumbnail and a search vector, except one you open, which is converted right away. The sidebar shows what is left.

make agent-test
make logs

Optional: iCloud Photos

rclone config: a new remote of type iclouddrive, your Apple ID, and service = photos. Then Sync copies the library into ~/Pictures/iCloud. When Apple wants a new two-factor code, every few weeks, the sync says so: run rclone config reconnect iclouddrive: and press Sync again.

rclone config
make sync

Or run it as a desktop app

A thin Electron window around the server, like meercal's and meerail's, with one thing a browser cannot do: dragging a photo out hands the target a real file, so a mail gets an attachment rather than a link. It needs the server running.

make desktop