The grid A search for theme:geometry An image and its tags Things Atlas: what each mood wears Atlas: the palette, month by month Ambient Ambient, reshuffled

Heeper is an inspiration machine. I capture a lot of inspiring images, and I wanted a minimal, beautiful way to organize and search through them.

The workflow is simple: save images to a local directory or upload them directly. They're resized and synced to iCloud Drive. From there, Gemini reads each one against a strict prompt and returns four kinds of tags — things, themes, moods, and colors. Things come back in singular and plural with a few semantic neighbors attached, so a search for "sofa" still finds the couch. Colors are restricted to a fixed vocabulary of about ninety names, which is what keeps the palette comparable across the whole collection. Every upload is checked against perceptual hashes of what's already there, so the same image can't land twice.

Right now that's 8,043 images carrying 419,836 tags: 7,589 distinct things, 3,111 themes, 828 moods, 89 colors.

Search

One box covers all four dimensions at once, with a prefix when I want to narrow it — thing:chair, theme:solitude, mood:serene, color:sienna. Autocomplete only offers terms the collection actually has. Things, themes, moods, and colors each get an index page as well: every tag, ranked by how often it appears, with samples.

Parallels and tangents

Every image page ends with its neighbors. Parallels share things with the image — the same subject seen somewhere else. Tangents share themes and moods but deliberately not things: something that feels the same and looks nothing like it.

Atlas

Atlas draws the collection as data. Five views: Spectrum, every color tag side by side and in proportion; Constellation, the leading themes linked wherever they land on the same image; Loom, the palette each mood dresses in; Drift, what a month of additions looked like, month over month; and the long tail, the thousands of things seen exactly once and never again. Every mark opens the search behind it.

Ambient

Ambient is a screensaver for the collection. A full-screen mosaic that swaps a tile every couple of seconds and reshuffles the whole wall every minute. Nothing to search, nothing to click — just the collection, running.

Heeper also speaks MCP, read-only, so Claude can search the collection, pull an image's tags, or look at the picture itself without going through the browser.

Tech stack: