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Clip

Zero-shot image classification and image-text search

MultimodalCLIPVision-LanguageZero-ShotImage ClassificationOpenAIImage SearchCross-Modal Retrieval
Last registry verification2026-08-18v1.0.0Orchestra Research
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Zero-shot image classification and image-text search

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Zero-shot image classification and image-text search

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Zero-shot image classification and image-text search.

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SourceOptional — install with hermes skills install official/mlops/clip
Pathoptional-skills/mlops/clip
Version1.0.0
AuthorOrchestra Research
LicenseMIT
Dependenciestransformers, torch, pillow
Platformslinux, macos, windows
TagsMultimodal, CLIP, Vision-Language, Zero-Shot, Image Classification, OpenAI, Image Search, Cross-Modal Retrieval, Content Moderation

Reference: full SKILL.md

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

OpenAI's model that understands images from natural language.

When to use CLIP

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Use when:

  • Zero-shot image classification (no training data needed)
  • Image-text similarity/matching
  • Semantic image search
  • Content moderation (detect NSFW, violence)
  • Visual question answering
  • Cross-modal retrieval (image→text, text→image)

Metrics:

  • 25,300+ GitHub stars
  • Trained on 400M image-text pairs
  • Matches ResNet-50 on ImageNet (zero-shot)
  • MIT License

Use alternatives instead:

  • BLIP-2: Better captioning
  • LLaVA: Vision-language chat
  • Segment Anything: Image segmentation

Quick start

Ordered, practical steps. Run one and confirm it worked before moving on.

Installation

Shell2 lines
pip install git+https://github.com/openai/CLIP.git
pip install torch torchvision ftfy regex tqdm

Zero-shot classification

Python27 lines


from PIL import Image

# Load model
device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
model, preprocess = clip.load("ViT-B/32", device=device)

# Load image
image = preprocess(Image.open("photo.jpg")).unsqueeze(0).to(device)

# Define possible labels
text = clip.tokenize(["a dog", "a cat", "a bird", "a car"]).to(device)

# Compute similarity
with torch.no_grad():
    image_features = model.encode_image(image)
    text_features = model.encode_text(text)

    # Cosine similarity
    logits_per_image, logits_per_text = model(image, text)
    probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=-1).cpu().numpy()

# Print results
labels = ["a dog", "a cat", "a bird", "a car"]
for label, prob in zip(labels, probs[0]):
    print(f"{label}: {prob:.2%}")

Available models

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Python10 lines
# Models (sorted by size)
models = [
    "RN50",           # ResNet-50
    "RN101",          # ResNet-101
    "ViT-B/32",       # Vision Transformer (recommended)
    "ViT-B/16",       # Better quality, slower
    "ViT-L/14",       # Best quality, slowest
]

model, preprocess = clip.load("ViT-B/32")
ModelParametersSpeedQuality
RN50102MFastGood
ViT-B/32151MMediumBetter
ViT-L/14428MSlowBest

Image-text similarity

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Python11 lines
# Compute embeddings
image_features = model.encode_image(image)
text_features = model.encode_text(text)

# Normalize
image_features /= image_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True)
text_features /= text_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

# Cosine similarity
similarity = (image_features @ text_features.T).item()
print(f"Similarity: {similarity:.4f}")

Content moderation

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Python20 lines
# Define categories
categories = [
    "safe for work",
    "not safe for work",
    "violent content",
    "graphic content"
]

text = clip.tokenize(categories).to(device)

# Check image
with torch.no_grad():
    logits_per_image, _ = model(image, text)
    probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=-1)

# Get classification
max_idx = probs.argmax().item()
max_prob = probs[0, max_idx].item()

print(f"Category: {categories[max_idx]} ({max_prob:.2%})")

Batch processing

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Python19 lines
# Process multiple images
images = [preprocess(Image.open(f"img{i}.jpg")) for i in range(10)]
images = torch.stack(images).to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    image_features = model.encode_image(images)
    image_features /= image_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

# Batch text
texts = ["a dog", "a cat", "a bird"]
text_tokens = clip.tokenize(texts).to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    text_features = model.encode_text(text_tokens)
    text_features /= text_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True)

# Similarity matrix (10 images × 3 texts)
similarities = image_features @ text_features.T
print(similarities.shape)  # (10, 3)

Integration with vector databases

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

Python21 lines
# Store CLIP embeddings in Chroma/FAISS


client = chromadb.Client()
collection = client.create_collection("image_embeddings")

# Add image embeddings
for img_path, embedding in zip(image_paths, image_embeddings):
    collection.add(
        embeddings=[embedding.cpu().numpy().tolist()],
        metadatas=[{"path": img_path}],
        ids=[img_path]
    )

# Query with text
query = "a sunset"
text_embedding = model.encode_text(clip.tokenize([query]))
results = collection.query(
    query_embeddings=[text_embedding.cpu().numpy().tolist()],
    n_results=5
)

Best practices

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

  1. Use ViT-B/32 for most cases - Good balance
  2. Normalize embeddings - Required for cosine similarity
  3. Batch processing - More efficient
  4. Cache embeddings - Expensive to recompute
  5. Use descriptive labels - Better zero-shot performance
  6. GPU recommended - 10-50× faster
  7. Preprocess images - Use provided preprocess function

Performance

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

OperationCPUGPU (V100)
Image encoding~200ms~20ms
Text encoding~50ms~5ms
Similarity compute<1ms<1ms

Limitations

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

  1. Not for fine-grained tasks - Best for broad categories
  2. Requires descriptive text - Vague labels perform poorly
  3. Biased on web data - May have dataset biases
  4. No bounding boxes - Whole image only
  5. Limited spatial understanding - Position/counting weak

Resources

Explains the idea itself. Read it slowly; the later sections build on it.

  • GitHub: https://github.com/openai/CLIP ⭐ 25,300+
  • Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020
  • Colab: https://colab.research.google.com/github/openai/clip/
  • License: MIT