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Visual search

Visual search lets you find photos by describing what is in them — "beach sunset", "birthday party", "red car in snow" — instead of guessing what the file might be called.

Searching for the phrase sunset over the sea: matching photos are returned with a Vision AI badge among the match reasons, and a note says weak visual matches were hidden

How it works, briefly

During enrichment, ArchiveMind runs an image-understanding model over your indexed photos and builds a visual index from the results. When you make a visual query, your description is matched against that index. In the packaged beta builds the model ships inside the app, so visual search works fully offline — nothing is downloaded at search time.

What to expect

  • It becomes available after indexing. Visual search needs the visual index, which is built after your photos are catalogued. In the current beta, visual search deliberately skips the very first session and turns on automatically from your next launch.
  • Building the index takes a while on big photo collections. Progress is shown honestly in the interface.
  • It is a similarity match, not magic. Descriptions of the overall scene work best; highly specific queries (a particular person's name, text visible in the image) are not what this feature does.

When visual search is unavailable

If the image-understanding model cannot load on your machine, ArchiveMind says so plainly and everything else — regular search, browsing, thumbnails, duplicates — keeps working. See Visual search could not start.