--- title: Search by meaning | Relic Help description: Find an item by what it is about rather than the exact words in it, and search the text inside your screenshots. It all runs on your own computer. canonical: https://relic.space/help/search-by-meaning source: https://relic.space/llms.txt --- Find # Search by meaning Find an item by what it is about rather than the exact words in it, and search the text inside your screenshots. It all runs on your own computer. Updated 10 September 2026 · Windows, Mac, Linux ## [Searching for what it is about](#about-not-words) Most of the time you remember what a thing was about and not a single word of it. Relic can work with that. A search for _that article about burnout_ turns up a link titled _Why ambitious people plateau_, even though the word burnout appears nowhere in it. The Relic window with that article about burnout typed in the search box. The top result is a link row titled Why ambitious people plateau, saved on a Windows PC three weeks ago and tagged link. Under it, a second row of notes. Nothing in the title matches the words typed. Relic matched the subject instead. Word matching still runs first and still wins when it is right. Meaning is a second pass that pulls in things the words missed, so a search never gets worse for having it on. ## [The text inside a screenshot](#text-in-images) Relic reads the words in your pictures. A photo of a boarding pass becomes findable by _gate B12_ or by _Condor Air_, the same as if you had typed them. Screenshots of error messages, receipts, and slides all work this way. The reading happens once, shortly after the item arrives, and the words are stored with the item from then on. While it is happening the row says _Analyzing…_ under its title. ## [Titles for photos and notes](#titles) Relic can also write a short title for an item that came in without one, and add a few topic tags. That is what makes a photo searchable by what it shows rather than by its filename. It runs on the items you keep, and on every photo. This one is off until you ask for it, because it downloads a large model and takes about a second per item in the background. Turn it on when you want your pictures named. ## [What has to be on](#turning-it-on) All three live in Settings›Search and AI, under the main [On-device smart tags](https://relic.space/help/settings-search-and-ai#smart-tags) switch. Turning that off turns off everything below it. Smart tags Semantic search Embed items so you can search by meaning, not just keywords. Off makes search lexical-only. Settings › Search and AI › Smart tags › Semantic search: toggle, default on. Image text (OCR) Pull searchable text out of images and screenshots. Settings › Search and AI › Smart tags › Image text (OCR): toggle, default on. Describe items Give saved items a short title and topic tags, so you can search what a photo shows or what a note is about. Applies to vault items and every photo. Off by default: it downloads \~666 MB and runs in the background at about a second per item. Settings › Search and AI › Smart tags › Describe items: toggle, default off. Everything here runs on your own computer. The models sit in a folder on your machine, the work happens there, and nothing about your items is sent anywhere for it. The full list of what each model does, how much space it takes and how much CPU it may use is on [AI on your device](https://relic.space/help/on-device-ai) and [Settings: Search and AI](https://relic.space/help/settings-search-and-ai). If meaning search is off With [Semantic search](https://relic.space/help/settings-search-and-ai#semantic) off, search still does everything on [the search page](https://relic.space/help/search): words, tags, operators, dates, and the text already read out of your pictures. It just stops finding things by subject. ## [On a phone and in the web vault](#other-devices) The models run on a computer. Your phone and the web vault do not run them, so on those two: * Words, titles, notes, tags, operators and dates all work exactly as they do on a computer. * Text a computer already read out of a picture travels with the item, so that boarding pass is still findable by _gate B12_ on your phone. * A picture that only ever existed on a phone has not been read yet. It gets read once it reaches a computer. * Searching by subject is a computer thing. Elsewhere the same query falls back to matching words. If a search works on your laptop and not on your phone, this is usually why. The item is there either way. Related [Searching your vaultFind](https://relic.space/help/search)[Search words and operatorsFind](https://relic.space/help/search-syntax)[Personalized rankingFind](https://relic.space/help/personalized-ranking)[The Relic windowGet started](https://relic.space/help/the-popup)