LocalLens vs PimEyes

LocalLens is an offline visual search engine for image and video collections stored locally. It indexes directories recursively into ChromaDB, then searches indexed media using text descriptions and ranks results by similarity. Users can upload an image to find visually similar files, or combine image and text inputs to refine a search. A duplicate finder surfaces duplicate and near-duplicate image pairs using a similarity threshold. Listed formats include JPG, PNG, WebP, MP4 and MKV. The project provides a Gradio web interface and a command-line interface, and can sync indexed folders when files are added or deleted. Supported vision embedding backbones include SigLIP 2, MetaCLIP, DFN-CLIP and CLIP. LocalLens is open-source under Apache-2.0 and has a free plan, with no paid plans or usage limits stated. Portable builds are available for Windows, Linux and macOS; Linux and macOS require Python 3.10 or later and Git. The documented baseline is a 4-core CPU, 8 GB RAM, 0 GB VRAM and 20 MB storage; higher CPU, RAM and VRAM are recommended.

PimEyes searches publicly accessible web images for faces visually similar to a supplied image, then links to the websites where results appear. It says the service does not identify or verify individuals. Whole-image reverse search is also available for exact matches, altered versions, and visually similar images. The free plan costs nothing and allows 10 searches per day, with no takedowns. Open Plus lists 75 daily searches and 10 alerts; PROtect lists 125 searches per day, 20 alerts, 200 takedowns, AI reports, and result management; Advanced includes unlimited daily searches, 500 alerts, 1,000 takedowns, and full Deep Search. Monitoring alerts can track new online appearances, but takedowns are not automatic: removal depends on the external site owner. Results exclude social media and professional networks. Uploaded search images are automatically deleted within a maximum of 48 hours. Users can request a verified opt-out from future searches. PimEyes says it encrypts image processing, describes the service as GDPR compliant, and says it does not share data with third parties.