---
title: "PixelRAG"
type: "tool"
slug: "startrail-org-pixelrag"
canonical_url: "https://www.graphcanon.com/tools/startrail-org-pixelrag"
github_url: "https://github.com/StarTrail-org/PixelRAG"
homepage_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.28344"
stars: 6079
forks: 479
primary_language: "Python"
license: "Apache-2.0"
categories: ["vector-databases", "data-retrieval", "ai-agents"]
tags: ["vlm", "vision", "rag", "agent", "multimodal", "searchengine"]
updated_at: "2026-07-07T18:38:42.09694+00:00"
---

# PixelRAG

> The end of web parsing. The beginning of scalable pixel-native search.

PixelRAG is a system for visual retrieval-augmented generation that allows searching documents based on their appearance rather than text content alone. It includes Python APIs for rendering pages to screenshots and searching a visual index.

## Facts

- Repository: https://github.com/StarTrail-org/PixelRAG
- Homepage: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.28344
- Stars: 6,079 · Forks: 479 · Open issues: 31 · Watchers: 23
- Primary language: Python
- License: Apache-2.0
- Last pushed: 2026-06-30T03:40:11+00:00

## Categories

- [Vector Databases](/categories/vector-databases.md)
- [Data & Retrieval](/categories/data-retrieval.md)
- [AI Agents](/categories/ai-agents.md)

## Tags

vlm, vision, rag, agent, multimodal, searchengine

## Related tools

- [ECC](/tools/affaan-m-ecc.md) - The agent harness performance optimization system (★ 226,962)
- [hermes-agent](/tools/nousresearch-hermes-agent.md) - The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research (★ 210,880)
- [AutoGPT](/tools/significant-gravitas-autogpt.md) - AutoGPT: Build, Deploy, and Run AI Agents (★ 185,417)
- [ollama](/tools/ollama-ollama.md) - Get up and running with Kimi-K2.6, GLM-5.1, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models. (★ 175,659)
- [transformers](/tools/huggingface-transformers.md) - 🤗 Transformers: the model-definition framework for state-of-the-art machine learning models (★ 162,347)
- [langflow](/tools/langflow-ai-langflow.md) - Langflow is a powerful platform for building and deploying AI-powered agents and workflows. (★ 151,298)
- [dify](/tools/langgenius-dify.md) - Production-ready platform for agentic workflow development (★ 148,070)
- [firecrawl](/tools/firecrawl-firecrawl.md) - The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. (★ 147,117)

## README (excerpt)

```text
<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/assets/banner.png" alt="PixelRAG — Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation" width="100%">
</p>
<p align="center">
  Official codebase for <b><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28344">PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for
Retrieval-Augmented Generation</a></b>
</p>
<p align="center">
  <a href="https://yichuan-w.github.io/">Yichuan Wang</a>*,
  <a href="https://zhifei.li/">Zhifei Li</a>*,
  <a href="https://zwcolin.github.io/">Zirui Wang</a>,
  <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-teiletche/">Paul Teiletche</a>,
  <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesheng-jin-9618b0201/">Lesheng Jin</a>
  <br>
  <a href="https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~matei/">Matei Zaharia</a>†,
  <a href="https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jegonzal/">Joseph E. Gonzalez</a>†,
  <a href="https://www.sewonmin.com/">Sewon Min</a>†
</p>
<p align="center"><sub>* Equal contribution &nbsp; † Equal advising</sub><br><sub>Work done at <a href="https://sky.cs.berkeley.edu/">Berkeley SkyLab</a> &amp; <a href="https://bair.berkeley.edu/">BAIR</a> &amp; <a href="https://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/">Berkeley NLP</a></sub></p>
<p align="center">Search any document by how it <em>looks</em>, not just the text it contains.</p>

<p align="center">
  <a href="https://github.com/StarTrail-org/PixelRAG/actions/workflows/ci.yml"><img src="https://github.com/StarTrail-org/PixelRAG/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg" alt="CI"></a>
  <a href="https://pixelrag.ai"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/demo-pixelrag.ai-7c3aed" alt="Live demo"></a>
  <a href="https://status.pixelrag.ai"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/status-live-22c55e" alt="Status"></a>
  <a href="https://join.slack.com/t/leann-e2u9779/shared_invite/zt-3ol2ww9ic-Eg_kB8omwe6xmYVd0epr4Q"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Slack-join-4A154B?logo=slack&logoColor=white" alt="Slack"></a>
  <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/license-Apache--2.0-blue" alt="License">
</p>

<p align="center">
  <a href="#what-it-is">What it is</a> &middot;
  <a href="#give-claude-eyes">Give Claude eyes</a> &middot;
  <a href="#how-it-works">How it works</a> &middot;
  <a href="#pipelines">Pipelines</a>
</p>

---

```bash
pip install pixelrag
```

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

```bash
# 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 https://api.pixelrag.ai/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries": [{"text": "What is the capital of France?"}], "n_docs": 5}'
```

> **Live, hosted endpoint** — [`https://api.pixelrag.ai`](https://api.pixelrag.ai/status) serves a
> pre-built index of **8.28M Wikipedia pages**. No setup, no API key. It even takes an image as the query
> ([visual search](https://pixelrag.ai/docs#search)) — see the **[API reference →](https://pixelrag.ai/docs)**.

Or try it in the browser at **[pixelrag.ai](https://pixelrag.ai)**, or run the demo notebook in
Colab  — it
renders a page and searches the hosted index, 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. Install the `pixelshot` CLI so it's on your `PATH`
(use `uv tool` or `pipx` to keep it isolated yet always available to Claude — a
plain `
```

---

**Machine-readable endpoints**

- JSON: [`/api/graphcanon/tools/startrail-org-pixelrag`](/api/graphcanon/tools/startrail-org-pixelrag)
- LLM index: [/llms.txt](/llms.txt)
- Full corpus: [/llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt)

_GraphCanon - The knowledge graph for AI development. https://www.graphcanon.com/_