This page describes Graph Starz as of October 16, 2026. The current version is a rebuild started on October 11, 2026. It went live at graphstarz.com on October 12. A release on October 15 added Sources, Your sets, the Areas slider, tag focus and a newer picture model, SigLIP 2, which redrew the map into eight regions.
Status: Live, before launch · Try it at graphstarz.com
Graph Starz turns a collection of pictures into a map you can explore by how they look and what they show. The current version is a rebuild started on October 11, 2026, after eight earlier attempts since July 2024. It’s live at graphstarz.com with 415 public-domain works from the Art Institute of Chicago, in three views: Atlas, Constellation and Lift. A Muse points at combinations the collection doesn’t have yet and suggests what to make.
What it is
Each picture becomes a star. Pictures that look alike, or share a style, mood or subject, gather into named constellations, and constellations gather into regions. The map is meant to help you find something, see what’s related to the picture in front of you, and notice the larger patterns in a collection, including what it has none of.
Most of the earlier attempts rebuilt sign-in, uploads and servers before getting to the map. This one starts with the experience: there’s no sign-in, no server and no database. The starting collection is tagged once ahead of time, and pictures you add yourself are tagged in your own browser and never uploaded.
How I tested whether the map holds up as it grows, from replaying uploads to choosing the picture model, is in the post Testing a picture map that looks good.
Views
All three views show the same map. Switching keeps your open picture, your search and your light or dark choice.
| View | What it is | Best at |
|---|---|---|
| Atlas | A flat map drawn like cartography. Zoomed out you see regions and contour lines; zoom in and constellations, then the pictures themselves, come into focus | Finding things and reading patterns |
| Constellation | The collection as a 3D sky you can orbit or fly through. Press C for a guided cruise past every constellation | Wandering |
| Lift | A flat map that rises into the 3D sky when you press L | Seeing how the two relate |
Every view comes in light and dark. Light mode looks like a printed star chart, with pictures in white frames.
Features
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Search | Search by mood, color, subject or constellation name, such as “stormy sea”, and the map flies to the result |
| Related pictures | Opening a picture shows two lists: Looks like, by visual similarity, and Shares ideas with, by descriptive words in common. Following them leaves a trail you can step back along |
| Tag focus | Click a tag on a picture, like plants, and every picture with that tag lights up while the map zooms out just far enough to show them all |
| Patterns | Recolors the map by subject, mood, style, medium or color, and shows which values the collection has none of |
| The Muse | Finds pairs of ideas the collection has plenty of separately but never together, marks each gap on the map, and suggests a picture for it with an AI-made draft |
| Sources | Adds pictures from seven public collections about 200 at a time. Step, Play and Back let you go at your own pace, and switching a collection off takes its pictures away |
| Your sets | Makes sets from pictures on your phone or computer, switched on and off like a collection. Your browser tags them on the device; the only download is the picture model, about 64 MB, once |
| Areas slider | Chooses fewer, larger areas or more, smaller ones, and redraws the map’s areas in a moment |
| Zoom levels | Shows regions, then constellations, then pictures as framed prints, depending on how crowded the screen is; pictures get sharper as you zoom |
| What’s new | A page on the site listing every release, newest first |
How pictures are placed
A model describes each picture from a list of media, styles, moods and subjects. Color is measured from the pixels rather than guessed by the model. A visual fingerprint, a list of numbers a picture model assigns to how a picture looks, places look-alikes near each other. Since October 15 that model is SigLIP 2, chosen over the original CLIP after a comparison of 16 models on 2,224 of the site’s pictures, scored against museum records such as same artist and object type. The layout combines the fingerprint with the descriptive words, and the constellation shapes, positions, region boundaries and names all come from those signals rather than being drawn by hand.
The Muse’s gaps are tested against shuffled copies of the collection, so it doesn’t point at patterns that are only noise. On October 11, 23 gaps survived, against an average of 0.9 in shuffled copies, and 5 of 8 draft pictures were tagged with both of their gap’s ideas [measured 2026-10-11, the project’s Muse run].
Releases
| Date | What reached graphstarz.com |
|---|---|
| October 12, 2026 | The first public version: 415 Art Institute of Chicago works, the three views in light and dark, search, related pictures, the Muse and a welcome screen |
| October 15, 2026 | A map that stays readable as it grows, Sources with seven public collections, Your sets, tag focus, the Areas slider, sharper zooming, faster loading of large maps, and the switch to SigLIP 2 |
Earlier attempts
Graph Starz started in July 2024. The eight attempts before this one planned a 3D universe and built a graph database, a queue-based upload pipeline and an AI Studio export, among others. The November 2025 attempt is public on GitHub and archived. The current code is in a private repository.
What doesn’t work yet
- There are no accounts, so your sets live in one browser on one device.
- Growth has been tested by replaying public collections, not by watching people bring their own libraries.
- Adding your own pictures is about eight times slower per picture in a browser that can’t use the graphics card, and speed on a real phone hasn’t been measured.
- Nobody outside the project has yet been watched trying to find a picture with it, so how usable it is to a newcomer is unmeasured.