Origin: Halfway through a chat, where is that meme?

Every heavy chat user has a bunch of memes saved on their phone and computer, but when they actually need one—halfway through a conversation, wanting to send a "Thanks, let's keep in touch" or "I'm just bad"—they can never find it. The filename is IMG_4821.jpg, albums are not categorized, and searching is impossible.

I first came across a great open-source project ShiQu1218/MemeTalk, which uses Python + Streamlit + SQLite to build a local meme semantic search system. It scans your local meme folder, creates an index using OCR and vector embeddings, and then performs multi-way retrieval. It's fully functional but research-oriented and requires running Streamlit in a browser.

What I wanted was something closer to an "everyday handy tool":

A native Mac App, a search box, where I type what I'm looking for, relevant memes pop up, and a single click copies it directly to the clipboard.

Thus MemeFinder was born. This article documents its development process from scratch to "menu bar resident + global hotkey