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How to find a photo by describing it, without sending your photos anywhere

You remember the picture — the lake at dusk, the red car in the snow, the birthday with the blue cake — but not the file name, which is IMG_4821. Phone apps solve this by uploading your photos to a server. This guide is about doing it on your own computer.

How ArchiveMind does it

An image-understanding model ships inside the app. After your photos are catalogued, ArchiveMind runs that model over them, on your computer, and keeps what it learned in the catalogue. Typing a description then matches it against your photos. It works fully offline: nothing is uploaded, and nothing is downloaded at search time — the model is in the download, which is why the download is large.

It works for photos on drives that are unplugged, because the model saw them when they were connected.

Steps

  1. Catalogue the folder or drive with the photos (Scan tab, Start Scan). Visual search is ready once the model has loaded and the photos have been processed; the interface shows progress.
  2. In Search Explorer, type a description of the scene: "beach sunset", "dog in the snow", "birthday cake". Whole-scene descriptions work best.
  3. Results that matched by content carry a Vision AI badge in Why this matched. Weak matches are hidden by default; a note lets you show them.
  4. Reveal in Finder / Show in Explorer takes you to the file when its drive is connected.

What it cannot do

  • Read text in the picture or know who is in it. It matches scenes and objects. For faces, use People, which groups the faces it finds (also on your computer) so you can name them; for text in images, OCR.
  • Guarantee a hit. It is a similarity match. A vague description returns vague results; adding a second word usually helps.
  • Run on every machine. The model needs a reasonable amount of memory. If it cannot load, ArchiveMind says so and everything else keeps working — see Visual search could not start.
  • Understand every language equally. Descriptions in English work best.

See also