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Not OP but one example is that recent VL models are more than sufficient for analyzing your local photo albums/images for creating metadata / descriptions / captions to help better organize your library.
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Any pointers on some local VLMs to start with?
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The easiest way to get started is probably to use something like Ollama and use the `qwen3-vl:8b` 4‑bit quantized model [1].

It's a good balance between accuracy and memory, though in my experience, it's slower than older model architectures such as Llava. Just be aware Qwen-VL tends to be a bit verbose [2], and you can’t really control that reliably with token limits - it'll just cut off abruptly. You can ask it to be more concise but it can be hit or miss.

What I often end up doing and I admit it's a bit ridiculous is letting Qwen-VL generate its full detailed output, and then passing that to a different LLM to summarize.

- [1] https://ollama.com/library/qwen3-vl:8b

- [2] https://mordenstar.com/other/vlm-xkcd

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You could try Gemma4 :D
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For me, receipt scanning and tagging documents and parts of speech in my personal notes. It's a lot of manual labour and I'd like to automate it if possible.
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Have you tried paperless-ngx, a true and tested open source solution that's been filling this niche successfully for decades now?
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Adding to the Q: Any good small open-source model with a high correctness of reading/extracting Tables and/of PDFs with more uncommon layouts.
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I use local models for auto complete in simple coding tasks, cli auto complete, formatter, grammarly replacement, translation (it/de/fr -> en), ocr, simple web research, dataset tagging, file sorting, email sorting, validating configs or creating boilerplates of well known tools and much more basically anything that I would have used the old mini models of OpenAI for.
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I would personally be much more interested in using LLMs if I didn’t need to depend on an internet connection and spending money on tokens.
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