videre

A local-first tool for making sense of a folder full of photos and videos.

• find and remove duplicates (identical and near-identical)
• search your photos by describing them, like "sunset over water" or "my red car"
• recognise faces and search by person
• import from Google Takeout, Apple Photos, or a Lightroom catalog
• browse everything in a generated HTML gallery
• fix wrong file dates from the camera's own EXIF data
• group photos by where they were taken

Free and open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence: no account, no subscription, no lock-in, and every line is yours to read, audit, or build on.

Documentation: docs.videre.sh

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

• Nothing to keyword first. Search works on photos you never tagged, by description, by person, by place, or by example image.
• Your photos come in from wherever they are stuck. videre import pulls a Google Takeout export, an Apple Photos library, or a Lightroom catalog into an ordinary folder, originals rather than derivatives, dates put back.
• 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 "Berlin", which looks a place name up once and remembers it.
• Free, open, and permanent. videre is open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. It costs nothing, has no subscription or paywalled tier, and cannot be discontinued out from under you: read exactly what it does with your photos, keep the version you have forever, fork it, or build on it.
• It won't delete anything behind your back. videre dedupe prints what could go and stops there. You decide, and you can look through the candidates in a browser first.
• Naming faces is bulk work, not a chore. videre groups faces together itself, so you name one group of 40 photos rather than tagging 40 photos.
• An unplugged drive is not deleted photos. Libraries spread over external drives are ordinary. videre prune only drops a row when the file is gone and its folder still exists, so cleaning up with a drive detached does not wipe everything on it.
• 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.

And because it's an ordinary command-line tool over an ordinary SQLite file, an AI assistant can drive it directly. videre mcp hands search and duplicate review to a model with no server to set up.

Install

On macOS or Linux with Homebrew:

brew install erhangundogan/tap/videre

Or download a binary from the latest release and put it on your PATH. No Rust toolchain needed, nothing to compile.

Or build it yourself, which needs Rust:

cargo install videre

If you previously ran cargo install videre, that copy lives in ~/.cargo/bin and usually comes first on PATH, so it will keep shadowing a newer Homebrew install. Check with which videre, and remove it with cargo uninstall videre.

Intel Macs are not supported. A dependency ships no prebuilt binaries for them, so videre cannot be built there at all, including via cargo install.

macOS is the primary platform. videre also runs on Linux, with one gap: HEIC photos and video frames are decoded using a macOS system tool, so on Linux those files are skipped for thumbnails, search, and face detection. They are still scanned, hashed, and de-duplicated.

Full install notes, including the extra flag needed to build on ARM64 Linux: docs.videre.sh/start/install

Quickstart

Start here. Your photo folder is the library: run videre inside it, and everything else reads from what this creates.

cd ~/Photos
videre scan

That builds a database at ~/Photos/.videre/hashes.db describing what you have. It does not change your photos. Every command acts on the library it runs in, so the rest assumes you are still in ~/Photos; from elsewhere, name it with videre --library ~/Photos <command>.

videre dedupe                 # list which copies could go
videre dedupe --html          # ...or review them visually in a browser first
videre dedupe | xargs trash   # delete them, once you have looked

videre embed                  # one-time: prepares photos for search
videre search "golden gate bridge at sunset"

videre faces                  # detect and group faces
videre gallery                # name the groups in your browser
videre search --person "Alice"

The first videre embed downloads about 780 MB of model data, and videre faces a separate 180 MB. Nothing is downloaded until you run a command that needs it, and both are resumable.

More: docs.videre.sh/start/quickstart

Commands

scan, import, dedupe, gallery, search, embed, faces, classify, locations, fix-dates, prune, watch, stats, config, mcp.

Every command takes --help. Full reference with every flag: docs.videre.sh/commands

Contributing

videre is maintained by one person and its direction is set deliberately. Bug reports are always welcome. If you hit a real problem or want a feature you would use yourself, so are patches: open an issue first to agree the approach. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.