Cautions

Most of videre is read-only. These are the parts that are not, plus the situations that surprise people.

videre dedupe prints files to delete

Its output is the REMOVE side of each duplicate group, so videre dedupe | xargs trash deletes those files immediately.

Look before you pipe: run videre report first and review the KEEP/REMOVE badges, or send the list to a file and read it.

Near-duplicate groups from --similar are deliberately kept out of this output, because they are for review by eye, not for automatic deletion.

Keep your photos connected when running prune

videre prune and videre watch --prune delete database rows for files they cannot find on disk. If your library lives on an external drive and that drive is unplugged, every file looks missing.

videre guards against exactly this: a row is only removed when the file is missing and its parent folder still exists. A missing folder means the drive or directory is gone, not that you deleted the photos, so those rows are kept and reported:

12,431 row(s) skipped as unreachable (1 directory missing: /Volumes/Photos)
  run with --prune-unreachable to remove them anyway

That matters because removing those rows would also throw away their search embeddings and cached thumbnails, which take hours to rebuild. Your photos would be untouched, but faces, names, and locations are stored against those rows and would go with them.

videre fix-dates rewrites file timestamps on disk

It sets each file’s modification time from its EXIF date. That is a real change to your files and there is no undo. It asks for confirmation first, and --dry-run shows you exactly what it would do.

Do not run two heavy commands at the same time

embed, faces, and watch all convert HEIC and video through macOS QuickLook, and each limits itself to a few conversions at a time. That limit is per command, not system-wide, so two at once can overwhelm QuickLook.

Measured on a real library: a single file took over 16 seconds against about 7.6 seconds normally, and one exceeded the timeout entirely. Nothing is lost, since skipped files are simply retried next run, but it is much slower than doing one thing at a time.

Disk use grows quietly

Each search model keeps its own data, roughly 130 MB to 190 MB per model for a 70,000 photo library, and the HEIC thumbnail cache can reach tens of GB.

Only videre prune reclaims any of it, and nothing warns you first. videre stats shows what each model is using.

videre scan remembers the first folder you give it

It adopts that folder as your default so later commands can be run without repeating it. It says so when it happens, and videre config set path changes it.