A while ago I discussed the Photo Search tool that I’ve created and that I use to index all my photos. One thing that had bothered me from the beginning was the need to use Python to load and use the models. I’m sure that there are some cases where using Python is not the worst choice, but those use cases typically involve rapid prototyping and not so much production-like scenarios where things like efficiency and resource consumption matter more.

With the advent of publicly available LLMs and embedding models, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone: I’d learn a bit about using such models, and I’d build a tool that lets me use a semantic search on my photos.

I keep those photos on a NAS in my home network, and frequently back them up using bart - my back-up and restore tool. So all I really need is a web site for showing the photos and letting me search them. That’s why I built photo search, a tool that uses publicly available multi-lingual models that work both on text and images to index and query photos based on the contents.