Search by describing what you see. Recognize faces. Find duplicates. Read text in screenshots. Searchy is a native macOS media browser with semantic search built in — your files stay where they are, and processing stays local.
brew install --cask ausafmo/searchy/searchy
The DMG is unsigned — right-click → Open on first launch, then allow in System Settings → Privacy & Security.
SigLIP and CLIP encode images and queries into the same embedding space. Search "dog on a beach" — it finds dogs on beaches, even if the file is IMG_4392.jpg.
Extracts text from screenshots, documents, signs. Hybrid mode blends semantic similarity with text matching — adjustable OCR weight for tuning relevance.
DeepFace with ArcFace detects and clusters faces automatically. Name people, pin favorites, merge duplicates, create face albums. Search by name.
Visual similarity scoring with adjustable threshold (85–99%). Auto-select smaller duplicates, preview before deleting, bulk cleanup.
⌘⇧Space summons a floating search window anywhere. Fully keyboard-navigable — ⌘1-9 to copy+paste, Ctrl+1-9 to clipboard, Enter to paste.
Select any photo to find visually similar ones across your library using CLIP embeddings. Great for finding variations or related shots.
Auto-index watched folders as new images appear with regex filters. Index external drives separately, including portable indexes that travel with a volume. Incremental — only processes new files.
Choose between SigLIP, CLIP, PE-Core, and other retrieval models. Auto-unloads after idle to free RAM/GPU, then reloads from disk cache on the next search.
Images, embeddings, OCR text, and face metadata stay on your Mac. No telemetry or cloud library. The local server binds to 127.0.0.1, with CORS restricted to localhost. Security audit.
Free, open source, private. Install the latest public build, or use Homebrew and keep it updated.