Search Your Photos by Describing Them.

Turn on Contextual Search with the sparkle button next to the search box, then type what you remember: "dog on a beach", "birthday cake", "red car". Pluto Photos looks at what is in your photos, so the words do not have to be in the file name or in any tag.

• Ranked by how well they match, with a slider to make the search stricter or looser
• Everyday requests work: "dogs without people", "videos from last summer", "screenshots"
• Finds the words and numbers inside photos too, such as receipts, signs and screenshots
• Each result says why it matched: it looks like your description, or a written description or the text in the photo matched
• Save a search as a Smart Album when you want it to keep updating as photos arrive

Before you can search, Pluto Photos prepares your photos once. It runs quietly in the background, pauses while you use your computer, and picks up new photos on its own.

• Choose what to scan: your whole library, one album or one folder, with a time estimate before you start
• Photo descriptions (optional): a short sentence for each photo. On Windows with a graphics card they are written about 8 times faster
• Read text in photos (optional): works offline, and new photos are read automatically afterwards
• Reliable: photos that could not be read the first time are tried again, and Rescan All asks before it deletes anything

Google Photos, Apple Photos and Amazon Photos send your images to remote servers for AI analysis. Pluto Photos does the work on your own computer. The AI models are downloaded once when you install and never send anything back:

• No internet connection required: search on a plane, in a cabin, anywhere
• No data ever sent to third parties: your photos are never uploaded for analysis
• No accounts or API keys: the AI runs locally

Scanning is processor-heavy work, so the computer matters. On a recommended computer a library of 20,000 photos is ready to search in about half an hour; on a minimum computer expect several hours, running in the background. A graphics card is not required, but it makes the optional photo descriptions much faster on Windows. See the system requirements for the minimum and recommended computer.

Technical details

• Search model: CLIP ViT-B/32, about 150 MB, downloaded once with the other AI models
• Descriptions: SmolVLM2-500M, a vision-language model, about 490 MB; on Windows an optional faster engine uses your graphics card
• Measured on a 2019 six-core desktop; thin laptops are usually slower
• Part of Pluto Photos Pro. Descriptions, text and search data are stored in your local library database