Queryable · Offline AI photo search app

Search your iPhone photos by describing them

Queryable is an offline image search app for your own camera roll. Type a sentence — or hand it a reference photo — and it ranks years of pictures by what they actually look like. Nothing is uploaded.

Open source2,900+ GitHub starsNo subscription

01

Color, emotion, odd ideas—and offline.

Queryable is useful when the clue in your head is visual but imprecise. These are the product’s actual App Store screenshots, built from searches in the developer’s own photo library.

A color “Pink sky with clouds” — color can be the strongest memory cue.
Queryable: A color — “Pink sky with clouds” — color can be the strongest memory cue.
A feeling “We fell in love” — an intentionally subjective query rather than a guaranteed label.
Queryable: A feeling — “We fell in love” — an intentionally subjective query rather than a guaranteed label.
An odd visual idea “Troll face” — a simple phrase can retrieve a visual symbol without a filename.
Queryable: An odd visual idea — “Troll face” — a simple phrase can retrieve a visual symbol without a filename.
The same search offline “Work life balance” in airplane mode — evidence of the local search path after indexing.
Queryable: The same search offline — “Work life balance” in airplane mode — evidence of the local search path after indexing.

02

What Queryable does not do

No text search inside photos

There is no OCR. Words printed in a screenshot or a document are not indexed — only what the picture looks like.

No background indexing

The index is built while its screen is open. New photos are added later with a tap, never automatically.

iCloud-only photos are skipped

Indexing runs with network access off, so make the photos you need available on the device in Apple Photos first.

No date sort, no jump to Photos

Results are ranked by similarity only, and there is no deep link from a result back into the Apple Photos app.

No Spotlight, widgets or Shortcuts

Queryable has no system-level integration. Everything happens inside the app.

Videos: poster frame only

A video is matched by its still frame, never by motion or audio — and cleanup never groups or deletes videos.

The Mac apps are legacy

The Mac builds still listed on the App Store date from 2023, are unmaintained, and are not recommended.

03

One-time purchase

Queryable is sold as a one-time App Store purchase, with no recurring subscription.

Queryable $4.99

$4.99 one-time · US store

Version
2.1.6
Requires
iOS 18.0+
App Store
4.7 ★ from 89 US ratings
Get Queryable for iPhone App Store information checked 2026-09-20. Local prices may vary.

04

Your library is not an AI training dataset

Queryable’s core indexing and semantic search run on your iPhone. Its index request stays offline; make cloud-only items available through Apple Photos first. Queryable does not operate a photo-upload server.

Inspect the code, not just the promise

Queryable’s search core is MIT-licensed open source, built around Apple’s MobileCLIP model, so you can read how local photo embeddings and text-to-image matching are implemented. The public repository trails the shipping app by a few months; the newest features are not in it yet.

05

Questions, answered

01What is Queryable?

Queryable is an AI photo search app for iPhone. Describe a scene in your own words, or hand it a reference photo, and it ranks your camera roll by visual meaning. The index and the search both run on the device.

02Does Queryable upload my photos?

No. The app makes no network request of its own — there is no upload server, no account, no analytics and no crash reporting. You can run it with the network switched off entirely.

03Does Queryable work offline?

Yes. Once the on-device index exists, search works in airplane mode. Two things need the network beforehand: photos stored only in iCloud, and the one-time system language-pack download if you want non-English queries translated on-device.

04Can Queryable find text inside my photos?

No. Queryable has no OCR. It matches what a photo looks like — scenes, objects, colours, composition — not words printed inside it. Screenshots are searchable by their appearance, not by the text they contain.

05What happens to photos that are only in iCloud?

Indexing runs with network access switched off, so a cloud-only photo with no local copy is stored as a placeholder and never retried. Make the photos you care about available on the device in Apple Photos before you build the index.

06How long does the first index take, and can I pause it?

It depends on the device and the library, so we do not publish a number. Indexing runs only while its screen is open, never in the background, and progress is checkpointed — you can stop and resume instead of starting over.

07Is Queryable free?

Queryable is a one-time App Store purchase: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no free tier and no trial. The US price was $4.99 when this page was checked; other storefronts differ.

08Can I search in a language other than English?

Yes. The English edition translates a non-English query on-device with Apple’s Translation framework, searches both the original and the translation, and keeps the better match for each photo. The interface itself ships in 18 languages.

09Can I search with a photo instead of words?

Yes. The camera button in the search bar lets you pick an image from your library or take a new one; Queryable encodes it and ranks visually similar photos. Any result also opens a Similar Photos panel.

10Can Queryable clean up duplicate and similar photos?

Yes. It groups near-identical shots in three tiers — exact duplicates, nearly identical, similar scenes — scores a suggested keeper, and waits for your confirmation. Cleanup only ever touches stills; videos are never grouped or deleted.

11How is Queryable different from Apple Photos search?

Apple Photos is free, built in and also on-device, so privacy is not the difference. Queryable takes a long compositional sentence rather than a category, and adds reference-image search and a similar-photo cleanup flow.

12Which devices does it need, and is there a Mac version?

iPhone or iPad running iOS 18.0 or later. Mac builds from 2023 are still listed on the App Store, but they are unmaintained and are not built from the current source — we do not recommend buying them.

13Is Queryable open source?

The CLIP indexing and search core is published under the MIT licence at github.com/mazzzystar/Queryable. The shipping app has since moved ahead of that snapshot, so the newest features are not yet in the public repository.

14Does deleting in Queryable also delete from iCloud?

Queryable deletes through the system photo library, so with iCloud Photos enabled the deletion syncs like any other. Items land in Recently Deleted first, and Queryable shows a single system confirmation before anything is removed.

15Can I sort results by date, or open a result in Apple Photos?

Not today. Results are ranked by similarity only, and there is no deep link back into Apple Photos. You can narrow a search to last week, last month, a span of months or a single year before ranking.

16What is 寻隐?

寻隐 is the separate Chinese edition of the same app, sold only in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. It carries a natively trained Chinese text encoder instead of the translation step, so Chinese queries are matched directly.