Search your photos by what is in them, entirely offline
Miscible is a free, open-source desktop photo gallery for Windows built around on-device semantic search. Written in C++ with a footprint of about 8 MB, it indexes a local collection and lets its owner look for pictures by what they contain rather than by filename, thanks to a CLIP model that runs on the machine itself. There is no cloud account to create and the photo library never leaves the computer.
Day to day, the workflow stays close to an ordinary gallery: add directories from the sidebar, let Miscible scan them and build thumbnails, then narrow the view with filters for file size, path and date added, each with include and exclude controls. One setup detail matters: on first launch the app downloads its CLIP model in the background, so the first run needs an internet connection; after that, search works fully offline.
The project is in active alpha and its author warns that things may fail or break. Version 2.0.0, released in August 2026, is a milestone: the first release to ship a precompiled Windows installer, so testing no longer requires building from source. Windows is the actively developed platform - the Linux build is currently described as broken and outdated - so this is best approached as a Windows-first experiment on a small, backed-up collection.
Featured in our discovery: Miscible: Find Photos Without the Cloud
A local CLIP model finds photos by their visual content - a query like 'mountains' works without any filename or folder discipline, and images never leave the machine.
The search model downloads once in the background on first launch; from then on the gallery and its search run without an internet connection.
Filter by file size, path and date added, with include and exclude controls, alongside a classic directory tree and thumbnail grid.
Written in C++ with a footprint of about 8 MB, no account, no cloud service, nothing uploaded anywhere.
No. The CLIP model runs on your device and photos are never sent anywhere. The only online step is the one-time model download on first launch.
Not reliably. Windows is the actively developed platform; the Linux build is currently described as broken and outdated, and there is no macOS build.