Unveiling rclip's New Power: Image-to-Image Search

If you have been following my work, you are probably already familiar with rclip, a command-line image search tool I built to solve a specific problem: navigating my personal collection of photos.

Today, I am excited to introduce a new feature to rclip. This update expands the search capabilities of rclip beyond text queries, allowing you to search for images similar to a given image. You only need to provide an image path or URL, and rclip will find visually similar images. For example:

cd photos && rclip ./cat.jpg

# or use URL
cd photos && rclip https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yurijmikhalevich/rclip/main/tests/e2e/images/cat.jpg

This feature was added a while back, but I have only wrapped it up properly recently. It is not just a cool feature; it is special because it was contributed by the first-ever contributor to rclip – a GitHub user ramayer. ramayer reached out with this incredible proposal, worked on the implementation, and after a bit of back-and-forth feedback, I was delighted to merge the PR into the project. A huge shout-out to ramayer for this incredible contribution!

Check out the video below for a demo:

Open source projects like rclip thrive on the energy and innovation of contributors. If you want to dive into open source and make a difference, several issues on the rclip GitHub page could use your attention.

That’s it for now! Test drive this new feature and share your feedback.

Until next time, stay curious!