One search bar for everything your PC can't search — images, screenshots, PDFs, and documents — offline, free, and open source.
A tessera is one tile in a mosaic: every screenshot, image, page, and document is a fragment, and Tessera is the picture they add up to.
Status: pre-alpha. The product definition and repository scaffold land first; the first release has not shipped. No performance claims are made anywhere in this repo until they are measured on real hardware — see
docs/performance.md.
Windows treats images as pictures and a thousands-of-files folder as a maze:
- You can't search a screenshot by the words inside it.
- You can't search a saved image by what it shows.
- Filenames like
Screenshot 2026-10-11 at 14.32.11.pngdescribe nothing. - Microsoft's semantic search answers this — but only on Copilot+ PCs, which most people don't own.
Type "the invoice from the airline" into one search box and get back the screenshot, the PDF page, and the docx — anything your PC can't search today, from every folder you choose:
- Search by the words inside an image — OCR runs on every screenshot and saved image.
- Search by describing what an image shows — a local vision model, no cloud.
- Search inside documents — PDF, DOCX, and text files by their actual content, not their filenames.
- Fast — hybrid keyword + semantic search over tens of thousands of files, designed to work on older hardware without a GPU.
- Private — everything runs on your machine. No account, no telemetry, no uploads.
- Open — MIT-licensed. The same index becomes queryable by AI agents via MCP (v0.3).
Not a screen recorder. Not a photo manager. Not cloud software. Not paid.
- Research, product definition, architecture (
docs/) - Week 1 — spike: measure OCR / vision-embedding latency on real hardware → measured, targets met after model swap (
docs/performance.md, ADR-0006) - v0.1 — images + documents: one search box, one index, Windows-first
- v0.2 — video: search inside recorded meetings, calls, and screen recordings
- v0.3 — phone camera roll + MCP: phone screenshots searchable on your PC; agents can query the index
- v0.4 — auto-organize: suggested names and filing, dry-run and opt-in only
- Benchmarks are published only after they are measured, with hardware and methodology attached.
- A roadmap item is checked off only when a release contains it.
- If the launch doesn't find users, the project stops instead of rotting — the criteria are pre-committed in ADR-0005.
- Product Definition v1.0 — the spec this repo builds from
- Architecture — crates, data model, pipelines
- ADRs — the decisions that are expensive to reverse
- Contributing · Code of Conduct · Security