SeekframeAI photo search on a Mac without uploading your photos
AI photo search lets you type what a picture shows, such as “dog running on the beach”, and get that photo back without tagging or renaming anything. Many AI photo services do this in the cloud, so your photos have to be uploaded to their servers first; the Photos app does it on the Mac, but only for its own library. Seekframe runs its AI model on your Mac's Neural Engine, so the photos and videos in your folders and drives are searched where they are and never leave your Mac.
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How AI photo search works
The model was trained on pictures together with words that describe them. It turns each photo, and each scene of each video, into a list of numbers that describes what is in it. When you type, your words become numbers the same way, and the pictures whose numbers are closest come first.
Seekframe does the slow part once, when you add a folder. On an M1 Pro it gets through about 113 photos a second, and an hour of video in about 26 seconds. After that, each search compares your words with every photo and every saved video frame (100,000 frames in about 10 ms), so the results update as you type.
Why it matters that the search runs on your Mac
A photo archive holds more than holidays: children, documents, receipts, screenshots of conversations, a scan of a passport. When the AI runs on your Mac, none of that is sent to anyone.
- Nothing to upload. Your photos stay in their folders, and a 500 GB archive doesn't have to upload before you can search it.
- No account. Seekframe doesn't ask who you are and has no analytics.
- Works offline. The model is built into the app, so you can search with Wi-Fi off.
- The Mac App Store edition can't go online at all. It isn't given permission to use the network.
| A cloud photo service | Seekframe | |
|---|---|---|
| Your photos | Uploaded to the service | Stay on your Mac |
| Account | Needed | None |
| Search without internet | No | Yes |
| What it searches | What you uploaded | The folders and drives you add |
Try it on your own photos
- Open Seekframe. The first time you open it, a short tutorial searches a built-in sample video, so you can see how it works before you add any of your own files.
- Click Choose Folder… or drop a folder of photos and videos on the window.
- Type a description:
a cat sleeping on a sofa
,fireworks over the city
,a bowl of soup on a table
. - Press Return to open the best match; a video opens at the moment the scene appears.
What it finds, and what it doesn't
Seekframe finds objects, scenes, colours, actions and places, and you can describe them in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and many other languages. You can also search with a picture: drop a photo on the window to find the ones that look like it.
It can't tell who a person is, and it searches only by what the picture shows, not by the date or the location saved in the file. In our own test (20 queries written before we ran them, on about 5,000 photos and some videos), the first result was right for 19.
Questions
Does Seekframe need the internet to search?
No. Everything happens on your Mac, so it searches the same way on a plane as it does at home.
Are my photos used to train AI?
No. Your photos and your searches stay on your Mac, so they can't be used to train anything.
Which Macs does it run on?
Any Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. The model runs on the Neural Engine built into these chips.
Will it slow down my Mac?
Seekframe works through your files in the background, on the Neural Engine. It pauses by itself in Low Power Mode and when your Mac gets warm, and you can pause it any time.
How much disk space does it use?
The app is about 374 MB, almost all of it the AI model. What it stores about your files takes about 10 KB per photo or saved video frame, thumbnail included.