pixelbrowse

Search any document by how it looks, not just the text it contains.

What it is · Give Claude eyes · How it works · Pipelines

---

pip install pixelrag

The two core operations — render a page to screenshots, search a visual index:

# Render any page or document to screenshot tiles
pixelshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python --output ./tiles

# Search a hosted index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages — no setup, runs against the live API
curl -X POST http://api.pixelrag.ai:30001/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": [{"text": "What is the capital of France?"}], "n_docs": 5}'

Or try it in the browser at pixelrag.ai, or run the demo notebook (renders + searches, with the images inline).

What it is

PixelRAG renders documents — web pages, PDFs, images — as screenshots and retrieves over the images directly. Visual structure that HTML parsing throws away — tables, charts, layout, infographics — stays intact, so the reader model can actually answer questions about it. Wikipedia's 8.28M articles ship as a pre-built index; the pipeline itself is general-purpose.

Give Claude eyes

The renderer also ships as a Claude Code plugin — the pixelbrowse skill. Instead of fetching raw HTML, Claude screenshots a page with pixelshot and reads the image, so it sees charts, diagrams, tables, and layout the way a person does.

Install it — no clone needed (pixelshot comes from pip install pixelrag):

pip install pixelrag                                # provides the pixelshot command
claude plugin marketplace add StarTrail-org/PixelRAG
claude plugin install pixelbrowse@pixelrag-plugins

Then just ask Claude to look at a page:

claude -p "screenshot https://news.ycombinator.com and summarize the top stories"
claude -p "screenshot https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12387 and explain the key findings"

Or use the slash command in an interactive session: /screenshot https://example.com. No MCP server, no backend: the skill just calls pixelshot (Playwright/CDP) on your machine.

How it works

Text-based RAG parses the page to text chunks and loses the table — the reader can't find the answer. PixelRAG renders the page to screenshot tiles, retrieves the right tile, and the reader reads the number straight off the image.

Two pieces make this work: (1) rendering documents to images instead of parsing them to text, and (2) a Qwen3-VL-Embedding model, LoRA-fine-tuned on screenshot data, that embeds page images into a space where visual content is retrievable.

Pipelines

Capture is the standalone pixelshot command; the rest of the pipeline runs through the pixelrag umbrella — pixelrag <stage>. Install only the stages you need:

Command	What it does	Install
pixelshot	Document → image tiles (Playwright CDP, PDF)	pip install pixelrag
pixelrag chunk · embed · build-index	Tiles → vectors → FAISS index	pip install 'pixelrag[embed]'
pixelrag index	Orchestrates the full pipeline: source → ingest → embed → index	pip install 'pixelrag[index]'
pixelrag serve	FAISS search API (FastAPI, CPU or GPU)	pip install 'pixelrag[serve]'