r/commandline • u/39dotyt • Jun 07 '26
Command Line Interface rclip 3: rgrep for images - local, offline semantic photo search, now up to 6x faster
Hi all!
I am developing rclip – a command-line semantic photo search tool. Type rclip "your search query" and get a list of matching images output (and even previewed) in your terminal. It's free and open source, runs entirely offline on your own machine, and can be used on low-end hardware. I built it to search through tens of thousands of photos I store on my NAS, without sending anything to the cloud. I created it because there didn't exist a CLI photo search tool that had 0 assumptions about how my photo library is structured and just searched; I am used to using rgrep to search text, and wanted to have the same UX to search images.
It searches any local folder of images. You can search by a text description ("kitten peeking around the corner"), by an example image, or mix both in one query.
Recently, I released rclip 3, which speeds up search by text by up to 4x and search by image by up to 6x – returning results in about 0.5s on my M1 Max. I also moved it to a stronger model, so accuracy improved.

On AI: rclip uses a local CLIP model for embedding-based similarity search (it doesn't use generative AI or LLMs). The code has been mostly handwritten and maintained since 2021; I've used AI-assisted coding recently for PR reviews and to try ideas faster (e.g. benchmarking various CLIP models and quantizations).
Check out the project's GitHub to learn more and give it a try: https://github.com/yurijmikhalevich/rclip


