Search Your Photos by Describing Them.
Type what you're looking for in plain English — "dog on a beach", "birthday cake", "sunset over mountains" — and Pluto Photos finds matching photos instantly. Powered by on-device AI, runs fully locally.
Pluto Photos includes an AI-powered contextual search engine that understands what's in your photos. Instead of searching by filename or tag, just describe what you're looking for in natural language.
How It Works
- Automatic scanning — When you import photos, Pluto Photos runs two AI models locally on your machine:
- ViT-GPT2 generates a natural language caption for each photo (e.g., "a group of people sitting around a table with a birthday cake")
- CLIP ViT-B/32 generates a semantic embedding vector that captures the visual meaning of the photo
- Search by description — When you search, your query is converted to a CLIP embedding and compared against all photo embeddings using cosine similarity
- Ranked results — Photos are ranked by how well they match your description, with the best matches shown first
What You Can Search For
- Objects — "car", "bicycle", "laptop", "pizza"
- Scenes — "beach at sunset", "snowy mountain", "city street at night"
- Activities — "people playing soccer", "cooking in kitchen", "hiking trail"
- Animals — "golden retriever", "cat sleeping", "birds in a tree"
- Food — "sushi", "birthday cake", "coffee shop"
- Abstract concepts — "happiness", "loneliness", "celebration"
Smart Search Features
- Synonym expansion — Searching "kid" also matches "child", "toddler", "infant"
- Stem matching — "swimming" matches "swim", "swimmer", "swims"
- CLIP + text fallback — If the AI model can't load, search falls back to intelligent text matching against captions
- Customizable synonyms — Edit the synonym dictionary to add domain-specific terms
100% Local Processing
This is what sets Pluto Photos apart. Google Photos, Apple Photos, and Amazon Photos all send your images to remote servers for AI analysis. Pluto Photos bundles the AI models directly in the app:
- No internet connection required — works on an airplane, in a cabin, anywhere
- No data ever sent to third parties — your photos are never uploaded for analysis
- No API keys or accounts — the AI runs locally, no external services
- Works in Docker — self-hosted server deployments get the same AI capabilities
Technical Details
- Caption model: ViT-GPT2 with beam search decoding (5 candidates per image, CLIP-reranked)
- Search model: CLIP ViT-B/32 (512-dimensional embeddings)
- Tokenizer: BPE tokenizer bundled with the app
- Performance: ~2-4 seconds per image on modern CPUs (no GPU required)
- Model sizes: ~340 MB total (downloaded once, bundled in the app)
- Caption quality: Beam search + CLIP reranking produces accurate, natural captions
Docker / Self-Hosted
AI contextual search works in Docker deployments too. The server automatically scans new photos in the background and builds the search index. Search via the Companion Browser just works — no extra configuration needed.
Part of Pluto Photos Pro
AI Contextual Search is available with a Pro license. Captions and search embeddings are stored in your local database and persist across restarts.
Download Pluto Photos for Windows, macOS or Linux at plutophotos.com