videre

What it does

Find duplicates

Exact copies by content, and near-identical ones by appearance. It prints what could go and stops there, so nothing is deleted without you.

Search by description

Ask for “sunset over water” or “my red car” and get matches, entirely offline. Or hand it a photo and find ones that look like it.

Recognise faces

Faces are grouped for you, so you name one group of 40 photos rather than tagging 40 photos one at a time.

Fix wrong dates

Set each file’s timestamp from the date the camera actually recorded, so everything sorts properly again.

Group by place

Cluster photos by where they were taken, using GPS already in the files.

Drive it from an AI agent

videre mcp hands search and duplicate review to a model over stdio, with no server to set up.

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 is a lens over a folder you already own. Point it at a directory and you get a single SQLite file describing what is there. Stop using it and your photos are exactly as they were.

• It never touches your photos. Nothing is moved, renamed, copied, or re-encoded. The one exception is videre fix-dates, which you run deliberately, and which only corrects a file’s date.
• Nothing leaves your machine. No account, no upload, no telemetry. The one exception is videre search --location, which looks a place name up once and remembers it.
• It will not delete anything behind your back. videre dedupe prints what could go and stops. You decide, and you can review the candidates in a browser first.
• 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.

Before you point it at a real library, read the cautions. It is short, and covers the handful of commands that do change something.