Hello Reader 👋 :)

I hope you're having a wonderful week so far! Things are more peaceful here, and today I have an exciting side project I'd love to share with you! Something very different than usual, but that I hope will be very useful for some of you :D

And of course, as usual there is still art and inspiration to look forward to!

Let's begin!

Why I built my own Pinterest alternative

Have you ever been through your image gallery with thousands of pictures, looking for one specific image? Or do you have a ton of them scattered across different folders?

That’s an issue I had since forever: sometimes I’m looking for a specific reference for my art, and I just wish I could just search for it instead of relying on luck!

Now, it might be possible if you use Google or Apple photos, but I’ve always been so frustrated that there was no free, local alternative that would work with my local files… at least I didn’t know of any!

So a few weeks ago, I started playing around with this idea, and using the knowledge of other side projects I did in the past, I started getting something working…

And that’s how I ended up with Sortie, a local-first pinboard :)

What’s in it!

So here is my own gallery manager! The basic idea is that your pictures are displayed in a Pinterest-like layout, and you can search through them in natural language :D

Here for example I can search the pictures I took in Japan in an instant!

How does it work? A local model goes through your pictures and classifies them in a way that can be searched! Search “landscape” and scenery comes up, “portrait” and pictures of people are shown. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to quickly find images!

On top of this, and using the same principle of the classifier, I added a lot of cool features that I always loved to have:

for example, instead of adding tags to your images, you can organize them into Pinterest-style boards and get suggestions on which other images to add!

And if you need more, you can even search and import images from Pinterest within the app, without an account, without trackers, and it filters out AI-generated images by default (so you don’t even need to look at them!).

One click and it’s saved, and it keeps the link to the original website if available.

My other favorite feature is that you can easily extract and copy the color palette of an image, and even search images by color!

You combine all of these and you can search for green pictures where your best friend was standing next to a river, or find artworks sorted by dates, or you have all your favorite memes organized on one board and it’s super easy to search for more… I’ve had a blast just using this gallery myself :)

And there is way more I haven’t mentioned: for example I recently added OCR, text recognition, so you can easily select and copy text from an image (mostly English, it struggles with non-Latin alphabets for the moment).

I’m super excited to have more people try it out!

Where to get it!

Sortie is an app available for Windows, MacOS and Linux! It’s completely free, and I have no desire to monetize it in any way (I’m more interested in doing art!) :D

You can get it through my itch.io page, or via Github if you’d prefer. I’ve tested mostly on MacOS but it should be fine on supported platforms.

Please don’t hesitate to message me if you run into any trouble or have any question!

How does it work! Does it use AI?

No, not quite!

Let’s first say that Sortie is 100% local, nothing is sent outside of your machine and the app works completely offline after the first launch (minus the Pinterest part of course). So no datacenter used, nothing sent to anyone.

Here is how it works in practice (without getting too nerdy I promise haha): a “model” runs locally and translates your images and search into a bunch of numbers, a point in a 512-dimensional space that is then stored in a file.

The idea is that similar images and similar words will end up with similar numbers, so if you want to search you simply translate the word into numbers and you get the images that are the closest to it.

So the model here is a neural network like ChatGPT, but it works completely differently -- it’s closer to a sorting machine. It has to be trained, but at a fraction of the scale and size.

I’m making this section for transparency, because seeing the system work really feels like magic, but once you understand the underlying tech it’s more clear what it does and what it doesn’t do :)

I’m available if you have any question!

Alright, that was a big chunk of tech info, now back on the art!

My art week :D

First off, we start with my progress on the main illustration!

For a few weeks I’ve been carving the details and coloring this scene, but I’m finally able to call it done now!

As a reminder, this is how the original sketch looked like!

Most of the challenge of those finishing touches were about contrast: how do you distinguish clearly a blue roof from the blue sea from the blue sky 😵‍💫 I sure love my blue roofs but they cause me some design headaches sometimes haha

I’m really happy to have this one completed, this was a difficult one! There is a lot of things I wish I could have done better, as always, but I’ll take those learnings into the next illustration!

I don’t have a sketch for the next one, but I have a few things I did in my sketchbook on the side :)

This weekend we were on an express trip on Saturday, and I was stuck in the train for more than 4 hours. I usually really love sketching during a ride, but this train was not comfortable for it at all 😄

I still managed to doodle a bit; here are 2 pictures from the ones I took in Japan last year:

You have to believe me it was a very shaky train!

(since I have my app Sortie to browse my pictures I’ve been reviewing my Japan trip quite a lot recently!)

Here are other sketches from my week!

The sketch is based on this painting that I love to revisit occasionally!

I’ll probably have started my next big illustration by next week, so look forward to some early visuals then!

Cool links of the week!

If you’re into knitting or pixel art, you might enjoy this website archiving traditional Palestinian patterns! :) Each has embroidery instructions in various formats!

Last week I talked about the art of Kawase Hasui, and since then I’ve learned about the work of David Bull, who carries on the tradition of woodblock printing! It’s super interesting if you want to learn more about this process! He has a lovely Youtube channel and a very cool website