Quickstart

Start here. Five minutes from nothing to searching your own photos.

Install it

curl -fsSL https://videre.sh/install | sh

No Rust toolchain, nothing to compile. On macOS, brew install erhangundogan/tap/videre works too and handles upgrades for you. Both are covered in install, along with building from source and the platform notes.

Scan a folder

Your photo folder is the library. Run videre inside it:

cd ~/Photos
videre scan

That builds a database at ~/Photos/.videre/hashes.db describing what you have, and everything below reads from it. It does not change your photos.

Every command acts on the library it runs in, so the rest of this page assumes you are still in ~/Photos. From anywhere else, name it explicitly with videre --library ~/Photos <command>.

Clean up duplicates

videre dedupe                # list which copies could go
videre dedupe --html         # ...or review them in a browser first
videre dedupe --remove       # move the copies to the trash (asks first)
videre prune                 # tidy the database afterwards

By default videre dedupe only prints a list for you to check; --remove is what actually deletes, moving the copies to the system trash after asking. Add --similar to also flag photos and videos that merely look alike (after videre embed); those are reported for review only, never removed.

Search your photos

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 1.5 GB 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

videre faces                  # detect and group faces
videre gallery         # 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

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

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 gallery                    # browse the whole library
videre stats                           # what's in the library
videre watch                           # keep everything fresh in the background

Working with other tools

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

videre dedupe --print0 | xargs -0 trash   # space-safe; or just: videre dedupe --remove
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

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 gallery starts 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.