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Private Photo Search in the Browser

Search your photos by description without uploading them anywhere.

Advanced30h1–3 people17/20 fit
TL;DR

Build Private Photo Search in the Browser for privacy-conscious people with big photo libraries in ~30h with 1–3 people. Stack: Transformers.js + CLIP + WebGPU + IndexedDB.

Why it wins: The airplane-mode demo proves the privacy claim on stage.

Build flow

01 · Problem
Cloud photo search works but means handing your whole library to a server.
02 · Solution
Run a CLIP model in the browser with Transformers.js to embed photos locally, store vectors in IndexedDB and search with text queries like 'dog on the beach'.
03 · Build
  1. 1Load a CLIP model with Transformers.js
  2. 2Embed images in a web worker
  3. 3Store vectors in IndexedDB
  4. 4Rank by cosine similarity to the text embedding
04 · Demo
Turn on airplane mode and search a 500-photo folder live.

MVP checklist

  • Local photo indexing
  • Text-to-photo search
  • Similar photo lookup
  • Zero uploads

Tech stack

TechRole
Transformers.jsOn-device ML models
CLIPImage-text embeddings
WebGPUGPU compute in the browser
IndexedDBTooling

Reference repos

Open-source projects you can build on. Links checked 2026-10-31.

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