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I accidentally built a meme search engine

bo0tzz
9 replies
1d6h

Last year we added CLIP-based image search to https://immich.app/ and even though I have a pretty good understanding of how it works, it still blows my mind damn near every day. It's the closest thing to magic I've ever seen.

apricot13
3 replies
1d2h

Just needs OCR for the perfect meme searching solution!

bo0tzz
2 replies
1d1h

OCR will be there at some point, but it already does a surprisingly good job without!

itake
1 replies
10h18m

I'd also consider adding searching via QR codes. you could search by the content in the QR code (like the url) or if its a URL, search the content on the page of the QR code.

Eisenstein
0 replies
1h40m

Why? I can't think of a use for this.

dsvf
1 replies
1d

Happy immich user here! I once took a cute photo of our baby chewing on a whisk, and actually finding the correct photo in an unsorted, untagged huge pile of photos by simply searching for "whisk" was a mindblow experience! It is an amazingly powerful tool!

pwillia7
0 replies
8h53m

How does it compare to Google Photo search? I search things like 'whisk' with success regularly... though to be fair not as random as whisk, but things like "steering wheel"

wruza
0 replies
8h31m

The “Demo portal” link breaks back button, btw.

fxtentacle
0 replies
12h17m

Wow I have been looking for something like that for a long time. Thanks for telling me about immich :)

atif089
0 replies
3h51m

Thanks for sharing about immich. I have a task that has been on my to-do list for several years now.

Amongst all the WhatsApp media on my phone I would like to get a list of all the videos and photos with my family in it and then delete the rest.

Is something like this possible with immich?

rovr138
4 replies
1d2h

You might be interested in this, https://github.com/mazzzystar/Queryable, https://queryable.app/

I run it on my iPhone.

Native app. Doesn't require a network connection (great for privacy).

Queryable is a Core ML model that runs locally on your device. Leveraging OpenAI CLIP's model encoding technology to connect images and text, you can search your iPhone photo album using any natural language input. Most importantly, it is completely offline, so your album privacy will not be revealed to anyone. And, it is open-source: GitHub
mazzystar
3 replies
15h19m

Thank you for your introduction!

After creating Queryable, I also developed an app called MemeSearch, which searches for memes on Reddit (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memesearch-reddit-meme-finder/...). Although it's completely free, it hasn't been downloaded by many users. I thought nobody wanted it, so I'm glad to see there are still some people who share a similar taste.

ggrelet
1 replies
14h10m

Thanks for Queryable, I use it quite often. As for Reddit meme finder, how do you deal with reddits sudden price increase for its api?

Also, I think you should use another icon from this app because it looks like a goofy side project. It probably is but people would probably not download iPhone apps if the icon doesn’t look professional. (My two cents)

mazzystar
0 replies
7h11m

I made this app when the Reddit API was free : )

As for the icon, I drew it myself. I found it funny.

rovr138
0 replies
6h38m

Definitely! Great app!

Hadn't seen MemeSearch, downloading it now.

harper
2 replies
1d

i thought this far too late

mulmen
0 replies
22h45m

I think that makes it even better. In the sense that you truly accidentally meme’d.

giancarlostoro
0 replies
20h48m

Don't you hate it when you accidentally the whole post?

rmdes
3 replies
1d5h

I want to do this but for 30GB of PDFs

mft_
1 replies
13h22m

I steered a friend towards Paperless (and away from an LLM solution) as a way of searching/accessing GBs of architectural PDFs recently - so far, it’s apparently working well for them.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

rmdes
0 replies
9h52m

I have been playing with it for a while but I miss a conversational interface where I can interrogate the PDF's and summarize them or let's say, find all the main events per year in a corpus of text and build a time-line of said events (context legal case with tons of text data to parse)

harper
0 replies
1d

this shouldn't be too hard

ianbicking
3 replies
1d4h

Huh, are the image vector embeddings implicitly doing OCR as well? Because it seems like the meme search is pulling from the text as well as images, though it's not entirely clear.

bo0tzz
2 replies
1d4h

CLIP does not have explicit OCR support, but it does somewhat coincidentally have a slight understanding of text. This is explained by training captions containing (some of) the text that is in the image.

osmarks
1 replies
6h25m

I think the SigLIP models' dataset (WebLi) includes OCRed things too, so they have very good text understanding. I tested a bunch of things for my own meme search engine.

speedgoose
2 replies
1d2h

It's very cool to see how it's now possible to easily replicate old Google Photos features in 10 hours using open-source tools on a laptop.

osmarks
0 replies
6h21m

The Google research was based on OpenAI research from 2021, though.

ritavdas
2 replies
1d5h

Did you host any version of this on the cloud for the general public to access?

harper
0 replies
20h12m

Nope. I would love to make something public using this tech. It is so magical.

araes
0 replies
5h9m

We're almost getting back to the .com era of the 2000's with some of these "public cloud" company demos. Enough frenzy, that if your app really starts grinding compute cycles you can quickly DDOS yourself with server costs. Even at $0.001/request [1], if you get 10,000 HN readers who all make 100 requests on average, you suddenly get $1000 server bill from somebody. Those used to be on /. all the time circa 2000.

If few convert, and most just tell their friends to try your cool demo, you can suddenly have 100,000 reddit users making 200+ requests on average every day cause your free demo's so cool. And suddenly you're mostly trying to figure out how to scrounge up server costs to cover the free parts.

Frankly, seems like the entire industry's probably going to have a lot of the same optimizations pretty soon. "How do we stop delivering such enormous JPGs with every Amazon/eBay click?" and similar.

[1] Slighly old article, so I lower the $/request on compute a bit from $0.0014 to $0.001. https://a16z.com/navigating-the-high-cost-of-ai-compute/

justinator
2 replies
1d

Hey @harper, you ever write about your vision quests?

harper
1 replies
20h12m

Rarely. They are mostly bust fucking around. I will try to document the current one more.

Fwiw, my recent blog is me trying to do this more

justinator
0 replies
7h46m

Cool!

pksebben
1 replies
5h23m

I apologize in advance if you're sick of hearing this, but...

I clicked through to your sites 'cause I dig your angle and I saw the bit about the kindle. Ouch, dude. Money sure ain't everything but holy crap.

You have my condolences. Keep building awesome shit, please.

edit: followup question - do you still have it?

harper
0 replies
1h36m

I will never part with my expensive kindle. Lolol. I read so many good books on it.

lancehasson
1 replies
1d3h

This is awesome! We made similar functionality (plus more) available through an API. If anyone is interested to try it out and share feedback, please message me and I’ll hook you up.

harper
0 replies
1d

would love to check it out

robotnikman
0 replies
1d5h

Gives me an idea for a meme search service I can use locally to search through all the images on my computer to find a specific meme (I tend to know I downloaded a funny one and then when I want to share it with someone I can never find it)

om8
0 replies
1d

CLIP is a very interesting technology.

On my previous job ML department created internal tool, where you could search through city panoramas (like google street view) using text.

It could find you in a second all road pits, overfilled dumpsters and other ugly (and beautiful) things you wanted.

lanej
0 replies
20h48m

Oh hey Eamo

diptanu
0 replies
1d1h

These hacks/side projects are amazing! I feel we will see a lot of creativity as tools to build data intensive AI applications become easier.

We built and open sourced Indexify https://github.com/tensorlakeai/indexify to make it easy to build resilient pipelines to combine data with many different models and transformations to build applications that relies on embedding or any other metadata extracted by models from Videos, Photos and any documents!

I didn’t know about SigClip, the author mentioned on the blog, need to add this to our library :) I also found it incredible that he generated the crawler with Claude! This is the type of boilerplate I hope we don’t have to write in the future

brabel
0 replies
13h10m

I imagine that we will see this tech rolled into all the various photo apps shortly.

Yeah, Google's and Apple's Photos both can search for pictures given a description of what you're looking for. In my experience both work very well (e.g. search for "cars" in your pics, and it'll find all your cars over the years if you, like me, take pictures with your cars a lot :) ).

black_puppydog
0 replies
10h29m

I love the use of "to Google something" to mean "take something tu t works pretty well and then make it so bad nobody will use/notice it"