Find any photo in your own catalog just by describing it

AI photo search lets you find pictures by describing what's in them instead of relying on file names, folders or keywords. A computer-vision model analyzes every photo once—subjects, setting, light, composition and mood—so a sentence like 'two people on a bench at dusk' finds the right frame. Photoreka is an AI photo search tool and image finder for your own catalog, not for photos on the web.

No. Photoreka only searches your own photo catalog—the images you've shot and imported into the app (from local files, Lightroom Classic, Google Photos, Dropbox, etc.). It never searches the web, Facebook, Instagram, or stock libraries. Think of it as a smart search box for your personal or professional archive, not a search engine for photos you don't own.

No. Photoreka does not create or generate any images. It uses AI to understand and find the real photos that already exist in your catalog. When you describe what you're looking for, it returns your own existing photos that match—nothing is invented or synthesized.

No. That's the whole point. Photoreka analyzes the visual content of your photos automatically when you upload or sync your library. You never need to add a single keyword or tag to search effectively.

Google Photos and Apple Photos also use AI search, but they're optimized for consumer snapshots and basic object detection. Photoreka is built for photographers: it understands compositional intent, lighting mood, stylistic references, and figurative language—not just 'dog' or 'beach'. It also gives you full control over your archive without locking you into a proprietary cloud.

Excire Search is a solid Lightroom Classic plugin for short keyword prompts. Its main technical constraint is the CLIP model it's built on: a hard context window of ~77 tokens (~50 words), meaning long or nuanced queries get silently truncated. Beyond length, Excire offers a single search mode—all results are associative by embedding proximity with no way to ask for something genuinely specific. Photoreka has no query length limit, offers three distinct modes (Broad for direct similarity, Adaptive for cultural and stylistic references that auto-expands your query with the right nuances, and Precise which adds logical inference to actually verify conditions), enriches results with insights, and lets you continue refining through ChatLab's LLM vision layer. It also works across sources beyond Lightroom: Google Photos, Dropbox, and local files in a single search.

Broad search uses pure embedding similarity—fast, associative, best for mood, style, and figurative queries. Adaptive is designed for cultural references and stylistic shorthand: when you type 'Blade Runner-inspired' or 'Hopper-esque loneliness', it automatically expands your query with the implicit visual vocabulary that reference carries (neon reflections, wet asphalt, isolation, side-lit interiors…), using Broad's recall and enriching it with nuances you didn't have to spell out. Precise adds a logical inference step: a reasoning model reads your description and actively verifies each candidate result against the specific conditions you set—it doesn't just pick the nearest vectors, it checks whether the answer is actually correct. Broad is great for exploration; Adaptive for cultural or stylistic references; Precise for when you know exactly what you're looking for.

Yes. You can search for 'melancholic portrait', 'chaotic energy', 'Hopper-esque loneliness', or 'cinematic tension' and get meaningful results. The underlying model was trained on a vast corpus of image-text pairs including photography criticism, captions, and art descriptions.

Analysis runs in the background and typically processes around 1,000 photos per hour depending on your connection. You don't need to wait for it to finish—you can start searching as soon as a batch is ready.

Photoreka sends compressed previews (not your originals) to our servers for analysis. Your full-resolution files never leave your machine. The search index is stored on your account and no one else can access your library.

Yes. If you have photos from Lightroom Classic, Google Photos, Dropbox, and local uploads all synced to Photoreka, a single search will return results across all of them simultaneously.

Try rephrasing your query. More descriptive language usually yields better results. You can also narrow down by date range, source, or combine the search with the 3D Atlas to visually explore adjacent clusters of similar photos.

Photoreka is built for the photos you kept, not every photo you shot: a curated body of work of up to 50,000 photos. Think of it as a studio, not a warehouse. Culling tools like Aftershoot, Imagen or Lightroom's Assisted Culling handle the first pass—rejecting blur, blinks and duplicates across thousands of raw frames. Photoreka works on what survives it: searching by mood, narrative and reference, scoring, clustering and sequencing a body of work. That's a deliberate design choice—every photo is read in the context of the rest of your catalog, so the analysis goes deeper when the starting point already has intention. Duplicate detection is built in for the stragglers.