During the weekend I built a contextual search tool for a photo library with 42k images across 2.8k galleries. The results are amazing!
Turns out the AI models that generate embedding vectors from images directly are BAD at capturing the image contents, so I had to first generate captions and then generate the embeddings for the captions instead.
Total cost: $30 for both captions (gpt-5-mini) and embeddings (text-embedding-3-large with 3072 dimensions).