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videre

Quickstart

Start here. Everything else reads from what this creates.

Terminal window
videre scan ~/Photos

That builds a database at ~/.videre/hashes.db describing what you have. It does not change your photos.

It also remembers ~/Photos as your default folder, so later commands can be run without repeating it. It says so when it happens.

Clean up duplicates

Section titled “Clean up duplicates”
Terminal window
videre dedupe                 # list which copies could go
videre report                 # ...or review them visually in a browser first
videre dedupe | xargs trash   # delete them
videre prune                  # tidy the database afterwards

videre dedupe never deletes anything itself. It prints a list for you to check. Add --similar to also flag photos and videos that merely look alike; those are reported for review only, never included in the delete list.

Search your photos

Section titled “Search your photos”
Terminal window
videre embed                              # one-time: prepares photos for search
videre search "golden gate bridge at sunset"
videre search --image reference.jpg       # find photos like this one

The first videre embed downloads about 780 MB of model data (Google’s SigLIP, from Hugging Face; see what gets downloaded) and takes a while on a big library. You can stop it at any point and rerun later, and it picks up where it left off.

Find people

Section titled “Find people”
Terminal window
videre faces                  # detect and group faces
videre report --faces         # name the groups in your browser
videre search --person "Alice"

videre faces downloads about 180 MB the first time.

Every command takes --help, and Commands is the full reference with every flag.

What needs what

Section titled “What needs what”

Each of the above is a small pipeline: search needs embed first, search --person needs faces plus naming, and prune belongs after anything that deletes files.

Workflows has the full map, plus recipes for the common jobs and rough costs for the long ones.

Other things it can do

Section titled “Other things it can do”
Terminal window
videre classify                        # tag screenshots/documents/memes
videre search --category screenshot


videre locations                       # group photos by place
videre search --location "Berlin"


videre fix-dates                       # set file dates from EXIF
videre report --all                    # browse the whole library
videre stats                           # what's in the library
videre watch ~/Photos                  # keep everything fresh in the background

Working with other tools

Section titled “Working with other tools”

videre dedupe prints one file path per line, so it pipes into anything:

Terminal window
videre dedupe | xargs trash
videre dedupe > to-delete.txt

videre search, videre dedupe, videre stats and videre locations accept --json for scripting, and videre mcp exposes search and duplicate review to AI agents over stdio:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "videre": { "command": "/path/to/videre", "args": ["mcp"] }
  }
}

Good to know

Section titled “Good to know”
  • Long jobs (embed, faces, classify) are resumable. Ctrl-C is safe, and rerunning continues where it stopped.
  • Two different videre commands can run at once against the same database. Running the same command twice is refused rather than allowed to corrupt anything.
  • videre report --faces and --show-faces start a local web server on localhost:7878. Nothing leaves your machine.
  • The only feature that touches the network is videre search --location, which looks up a place name once and caches the result.