videre

<p align="center"> <picture> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" srcset="assets/logo-animated-dark.svg"> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)" srcset="assets/logo-animated-light.svg"> <img alt="videre logo" src="assets/logo-animated-light.svg" width="216"> </picture> </p> # videre **Not an alternative to anything. A new kind of media library, built for the age of AI.** A local-first tool for making sense of a folder full of photos and videos. - find and remove duplicates (identical *and* near-identical) - search your photos by describing them, like "sunset over water" or "my red car", and narrow the results in the same query by person, place and radius, date range, category, media type, rating, like or tag - recognise faces, group them automatically, and search by person, with a strong face engine - import from Google Takeout, Apple Photos, or a Lightroom catalog - browse it all in `videre gallery`, a local web UI with every file, duplicate review, a date drill-down, face clusters and people, a map view, and automatic time-and-place events, and select many photos at once to rate, tag, rotate or move to the Trash - fix wrong file dates from the camera's own EXIF data - group photos by where they were taken Free and open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence: no account, no subscription, no lock-in, and every line is yours to read, audit, or build on. **Documentation: [docs.videre.sh](https://docs.videre.sh)** ## Why videre Most photo apps want to *own* your library. They import everything into their own storage, index it in a database only they can read, then nudge you toward their cloud. videre works the other way round: it's a lens over a folder you already own. Point it at a directory and you get a single SQLite file describing what's there. Stop using it and your photos are exactly as they were. - **Original by design.** videre is not a clone of a photo app. It is a library you can query, script and automate from the terminal, and the gallery is one view of it. - **A foundation that lasts.** One Rust binary and one SQLite file inside your library. Every long job resumes where it stopped, and every operation leaves the library consistent on its own. - **Easy to use with AI.** `videre mcp` lets an assistant search your photos and review duplicates, `search`, `dedupe`, `status` and the other reporting commands answer in `--json`, and every failure carries a documented error kind an agent can act on. - **Ask for the photo you remember, the way you remember it.** "Elena on a beach near Lisbon, summer 2023" is one query: a description, a person, a place and a date range together, across photos you never tagged or sorted. - **Your photos come in from wherever they are stuck.** `videre import` pulls a Google Takeout export, an Apple Photos library, or a Lightroom catalog into an ordinary folder, originals rather than derivatives, dates put back. - **It never touches your photos behind your back.** Nothing is moved, renamed, copied, or re-encoded. The only changes to a file are ones you ask for: `videre fix-dates` corrects a file's date, and rotating a photo in the gallery updates its orientation tag. - **Nothing leaves your machine.** No account, no upload, no telemetry. The search and face models and the offline map are downloaded once on first use; after that the one network call is `videre search --location "Berlin"`, which looks a place name up once and remembers it. - **Free, open, and permanent.** videre is open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. It costs nothing, has no subscription or paywalled tier, and cannot be discontinued out from under you: read exactly what it does with your photos, keep the version you have forever, fork it, or build on it. - **It won't delete anything behind your back.** `videre dedupe` prints what *could* go and stops there. You decide, and you can look through the candidates in a browser first. - **Naming faces is bulk work, not a chore.** videre groups faces together itself, so you name one group of 40 photos rather than tagging 40 photos. A face you named never moves on its own. - **A gallery when you want one, not a server you keep.** `videre gallery` starts a local web UI for browsing, reviewing duplicates, naming people, exploring the map and reliving events by time and place. Stop it with Ctrl-C and nothing keeps running. - **An unplugged drive is not deleted photos.** Libraries spread over external drives are ordinary. `videre prune` only drops a row when the file is gone *and* its folder still exists, so cleaning up with a drive detached does not wipe everything on it. - **Long jobs are safe to interrupt.** Preparing search or scanning faces can take hours on a large library. Ctrl-C is fine; rerunning continues from where it stopped. And because it's an ordinary command-line tool over an ordinary SQLite file, an AI assistant can drive it directly. `videre mcp` hands search and duplicate review to a model with no server to set up. ## Install On macOS or Linux with Homebrew: ```bash brew install erhangundogan/tap/videre ``` Or download a binary from the [latest release](https://github.com/erhangundogan/videre/releases/latest) and put it on your `PATH`. No Rust toolchain needed, nothing to compile. Or build it yourself, which needs Rust: ```bash cargo install videre --locked ``` **If you previously ran `cargo install videre`**, that copy lives in `~/.cargo/bin` and usually comes first on `PATH`, so it will keep shadowing a newer Homebrew install. Check with `which videre`, and remove it with `cargo uninstall videre`. **Intel Macs are not supported.** A dependency ships no prebuilt binaries for them, so videre cannot be built there at all, including via `cargo install`. **macOS is the primary platform.** videre also runs on Linux, with one gap: HEIC photos and video frames are decoded using a macOS system tool, so on Linux those files are skipped for thumbnails, search, and face detection. They are still scanned, hashed, and de-duplicated. Full install notes, including the extra flag needed to build on ARM64 Linux: [docs.videre.sh/start/install](https://docs.videre.sh/start/install/) ## Quickstart Start here. Your photo folder is the library: run videre inside it, and everything else reads from what this creates. ```bash cd ~/Photos videre scan ``` That builds a database at `~/Photos/.videre/hashes.db` describing what you have. It does not change your photos. Every command acts on the library it runs in, so the rest assumes you are still in `~/Photos`; from elsewhere, name it with `videre --library ~/Photos <command>`. ```bash videre dedupe # list which copies could go videre dedupe review # ...or review them visually in a browser first videre dedupe trash # move the copies to the trash, once you have looked videre dedupe undo # ...changed your mind? put the last run back videre dedupe delete # ...or delete them permanently, faster, no undo videre dedupe --kind resized # the same photo at another size (WhatsApp copies) videre embed # one-time: prepares photos for search videre search "golden gate bridge at sunset" videre faces # detect and group faces videre gallery # name the groups in your browser videre search --person "Alice" # Words to search by meaning, filters, OR, NOT and grouping, in one query videre search '"sunset over the sea" (person:Alice OR person:Bob) place:lisbon rating:>=4 -tag:screenshot' --after 2022-06-01 ``` Queries follow the familiar Gmail and GitHub search style: [docs.videre.sh/reference/query-syntax](https://docs.videre.sh/reference/query-syntax/) The first `videre embed` downloads about 1.5 GB of model data, and `videre faces` a separate 180 MB. Nothing is downloaded until you run a command that needs it, and both are resumable. More: [docs.videre.sh/start/quickstart](https://docs.videre.sh/start/quickstart/) ## Commands `scan`, `import`, `dedupe`, `gallery`, `search`, `embed`, `faces`, `classify`, `locations`, `fix-dates`, `mark`, `tag`, `export`, `prune`, `pipeline`, `watch`, `status`, `stats`, `config`, `mcp`. Every command takes `--help`. Full reference with every flag: [docs.videre.sh/commands](https://docs.videre.sh/commands/) ## Contributing videre is maintained by one person and its direction is set deliberately. Bug reports are always welcome. If you hit a real problem or want a feature you would use yourself, so are patches: open an issue first to agree the approach. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md). ## License Apache License 2.0. See [LICENSE](LICENSE).