Glimpse

Find any screenshot by the text in it — or by what it looks like.
Press Win+Alt+S, type a few letters you remember seeing, and it's there.

You took a screenshot of that error message, that network diagram, that receipt. You remember what was in it, not what it was called or when. Glimpse reads every image in your folders, so you can just type what you remember: "moca", "invoice 2024", "in:notes network". Or describe it — "network diagram", "dark dashboard" — and it finds images that look like that, even with no matching words.

• Text in images: every screenshot, photo and diagram is read with the OCR built into Windows; any 3-letter fragment matches, and the matched words are outlined on the preview
• Search by look: a CLIP model running on your GPU (or CPU) understands what images show; Ctrl+M finds images similar to the selected one
• Grab what you found: Ctrl+C copies the image, Ctrl+Shift+T copies its text
• Always ready: lives in the tray, indexes new screenshots as they land, and plugs into PowerToys Command Palette
• Private: nothing is uploaded, no account, no telemetry

By the numbers

Measured on a laptop (Core i9-10980HK, RTX 2080 Super Max-Q) with 10,038 images indexed (screenshots, notes attachments, Downloads):

Search times are for the engine on a warm index; run glimpse-cli bench to measure your own machine.

Try it

Download Glimpse-<version>-win-x64.zip from Releases, extract it, and double-click Install.cmd. Test builds aren't code-signed yet, so Windows may say "Windows protected your PC": click More info → Run anyway. A short welcome screen lets you pick folders and (optionally) download the visual search model; then press Win+Alt+S.

• Installs for your user only (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Glimpse), no admin, no .NET install needed
• Windows 10 1809+ / Windows 11, x64; a DirectX 12 GPU speeds up visual search but isn't required
• Uninstall from Settings → Apps → Installed apps (you choose whether to keep the index)
• Nothing leaves your PC; the only network access is the optional visual-model download
• Optional: Glimpse-CmdPal-<version>-win-x64.zip adds Glimpse to PowerToys Command Palette (needs Developer Mode)

How it works

OCR is the engine built into Windows (Windows.Media.Ocr). The index is SQLite: an FTS5 table with the trigram tokenizer (so any 3+ character fragment matches anywhere in a word) plus CLIP ViT-B/16 image embeddings, compared in memory with SIMD. Results merge exact text hits first, then loose text and visual matches interleaved (reciprocal rank fusion). Inspired by gyotaku for Linux.

src/Glimpse.Core   OCR, SQLite index, incremental indexer, folder watcher
src/Glimpse.Cli    `glimpse-cli` command: index / embed / model / search / ocr / stats / sources
src/Glimpse.App    WinUI 3 search window (unpackaged, Mica, global hotkey, tray, pipe server)
src/Glimpse.CmdPal PowerToys Command Palette extension (MSIX, talks to the app over a named pipe)

Install from source

pwsh scripts/install.ps1                # Release build → %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Glimpse, start with Windows, launch in tray
pwsh scripts/install.ps1 -NoAutoStart   # same, without the login entry

Re-run to update. Glimpse lives in the tray: left-click toggles the window, right-click for Re-index now / Settings / Quit. The X button hides to the tray. Launching it again just brings up the running copy. Windows 11 puts new tray icons in the ^ overflow; drag it onto the taskbar to keep it visible.

Develop

dotnet build src/Glimpse.App
src/Glimpse.App/bin/x64/Debug/net9.0-windows10.0.19041.0/win-x64/Glimpse.exe           # window
src/Glimpse.App/bin/x64/Debug/net9.0-windows10.0.19041.0/win-x64/Glimpse.exe --hidden  # background, hotkey only

dotnet run --project src/Glimpse.Cli -- index           # all sources
dotnet run --project src/Glimpse.Cli -- search moca

The app indexes on startup (only new/changed files) and then watches the folders.

Visual search

Besides OCR text, every image is embedded with CLIP ViT-B/16 (ONNX, run on the GPU through DirectML, CPU fallback), so you can search by what an image looks like: "network diagram", "bar chart", "dark dashboard". About 1.5 minutes for 9k images on an RTX 2080.

Results are hybrid: exact text hits (a one-word query, or the words together as typed) come first, then loose text hits and visual matches interleaved (reciprocal rank fusion). Visual matches carry a "≈ looks like" badge. Visual toggle (Ctrl+T) or a ~ prefix = visual only. Ctrl+M = more like the selected image.

The model is a one-time ~392 MB download (Settings → Visual search → Download, or glimpse-cli model) into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Glimpse\models\clip-vit-b16, with resumable, size-checked files. Without it, visual search is simply off. The app embeds new images after each OCR pass; from the CLI run glimpse-cli embed.

Command Palette

src/Glimpse.CmdPal is a PowerToys Command Palette extension: type Glimpse in the palette (Win+Alt+Space) for a live thumbnail grid with a details pane. Enter opens, Ctrl+Enter copies the image, Ctrl+Shift+T copies its text, Ctrl+K for copy path / show in folder / more like this / open in Glimpse. A filter dropdown switches to visual only. Typing 3+ characters on the palette's home also offers Search images for "…" under Fallbacks.

pwsh scripts/install-cmdpal.ps1              # build + register (needs Developer Mode, no signing)
pwsh scripts/install-cmdpal.ps1 -Uninstall

Tip: give it an alias in Command Palette → Settings → Extensions → Glimpse (e.g. ss), then ss moca jumps straight to results. (Every command has a stable id, so aliases and pins survive updates.)

How it fits together: the extension is an MSIX-packaged COM server (that's how the palette loads extensions). It doesn't open the index itself; it asks the running Glimpse app over a per-user named pipe (Glimpse.Core/Ipc/GlimpseIpc.cs, compiled into both). The app answers from its warm search engine and includes 256px thumbnails as bytes, because packaged apps get a virtualized view of AppData and can't read the thumbnail cache by path.

Search syntax

Keys

Win+Alt+S toggle · Enter open · Ctrl+C copy image · Ctrl+Shift+T copy text · Ctrl+Shift+C copy path · Ctrl+E show in folder · Ctrl+T visual only · Ctrl+M more like this · Ctrl+, settings · Esc clear / hide · Ctrl+Q quit

Settings

Tray → Settings, the gear in the search bar, or Ctrl+,. Changes apply immediately, no restart:

• Keyboard shortcut: modifiers + key, checked live against what Windows and other apps already use
• Start with Windows
• Folders: add (folder picker), remove, rename (the name is what in: matches), include subfolders. Removing or renaming a folder takes its images out of the index; files are never touched
• Visual search: on/off, model download / remove with progress, GPU on/off
• Indexing: OneDrive online-only files, parallel workers, index stats, Re-index now, Rebuild, thumbnail cache size + Clear
• About: version, data folder, log

First run defaults to the Windows Screenshots and Downloads known folders (following OneDrive backup or relocation). Everything is stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Glimpse (config.json, index.db, models\, thumbs\, glimpse.log).

Releasing

pwsh packaging/build-release.ps1 -Version 0.5.0   # local: artifacts\*.zip + SHA256SUMS.txt
git tag v0.5.0; git push origin v0.5.0            # CI: builds the same zips and publishes a GitHub release

Tags with a suffix (v0.6.0-beta.1) publish as pre-releases. Actions → Release → Run workflow builds the zips as an artifact without publishing. Release notes start from packaging/release-notes.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Bundled components and their licenses: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Roadmap

• Visual search (CLIP embeddings via ONNX) — "network diagram", "dark dashboard"
• Tray icon + start with Windows
• Command Palette extension (ss moca)
• Settings page (folders, hotkey, visual model download, indexing)
• Copy text (Ctrl+Shift+T, also in Command Palette)
• GitHub releases: self-contained zip, per-user installer/uninstaller
• Code signing (SmartScreen), signed MSIX for the Command Palette extension, auto-update
• First-run welcome: pick folders, offer the visual model, show the shortcut
• Clipboard-only snips (Win+Shift+S without auto-save)
• OCR + embed several GIF frames, not just the first