nori-captioner 0.1.2

Simple local web UI for captioning image/video datasets with optional local VLM auto-captioning

nori-captioner

Local Vision Caption Studio for Images and Video.

A web UI for captioning image/video datasets in-place using local VLMs. Captions are saved as sidecar .txt files next to each media file.

Quick start

uv run nori-captioner

Scans the current directory (or a given path) recursively for images and videos and opens a local web UI.

uv run nori-captioner /path/to/dataset

Features

• Recursive directory scan — hidden directories are excluded
• Per-file metadata display: resolution, duration, frame count, fps
• Manual caption editing with autosave
• Upload images/videos via file picker or drag-and-drop
• Delete files (removes media and sidecar caption together)
• Auto-captioning queue with single-file and batch modes
• Configurable user prompt — editable in the UI and persisted to disk
• Pagination and filter by caption state (all / captioned / uncaptioned / queued)

Auto-captioning with local VLMs

Install VLM extras:

uv sync --extra vlm

Note: Qwen3-VL requires torchvision, which is included in the vlm extra. On Linux x86_64, CUDA 12.8 wheels for torch and torchvision are used automatically.

Optional 4-bit / 8-bit quantization:

uv sync --extra vlm --extra quantize

Run with a built-in model alias:

uv run nori-captioner --model qwen3-vl:8b

Or pass any Hugging Face model ID directly:

uv run nori-captioner --model your-org/your-vlm

Model aliases

Alias	Model
qwen3-vl:2b	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
qwen3-vl:4b	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
qwen3-vl:8b	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
qwen3-vl:32b	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
qwen3-vl:30b	Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
qwen2.5-vl:3b	Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct
qwen2.5-vl:7b	Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct
qwen2.5-vl:72b	Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct
qwen2-vl:2b	Qwen/Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct
qwen2-vl:7b	Qwen/Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct
qwen2-vl:72b	Qwen/Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
gemma3:4b	google/gemma-3-4b-it
gemma3:12b	google/gemma-3-12b-it
gemma3:27b	google/gemma-3-27b-it

CLI options

Option	Default	Description
directory	.	Directory to scan
--model	none	Model alias or HF model ID
--quantize	none	4 or 8 bit quantization
--device	auto	auto, cuda, mps, or cpu
--frames	8	Video frames sampled per auto-caption
--system-prompt	built-in	System prompt for model behavior
--prompt	built-in	Captioning prompt (also editable in UI)
--host	127.0.0.1	Server bind address
--port	8765	Server port
--no-browser	false	Suppress automatic browser open

Prompt persistence

The user prompt edited in the web UI is saved to .nori-captioner.settings.json in the scanned directory and automatically restored on next launch.