About OnlyPepes

The Project

OnlyPepes is my personal collection of Pepe memes and my playground for learning about AI tools and digital technology in general.

The project consists of a database of Pepe images, a web interface to browse and search through them, a public API, and a Telegram bot for searching memes on the go.

AI-Powered Descriptions

One of the key features is AI-powered image analysis to automatically generate descriptions for each meme, enabling users to search and filter images by their content rather than just filenames.

I documented my journey of automating descriptions for over 10,000 Pepe memes. I tested multiple AI models including OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Gemini, LLaVA, Baklava, and various models from Hugging Face and Ollama. After comparing results, OpenAI's API provided the best balance of accuracy and quality. The entire process ended up costing less than $5 (approximately $4.34 for input tokens and $0.40 for output tokens), automated with a Python script that processes all database images, generates descriptions, and saves them automatically.

Duplicate Detection

When I first started building the collection, I gathered images from various Telegram channels. To maintain quality and avoid duplicates, I researched and implemented perceptual hashing (pHash) to detect duplicate images before adding them to the database. This uses Hamming distance calculations to identify similar images, even if they've been slightly modified.

Running AI Locally

As the collection grew and I needed to generate more descriptions, I wanted to avoid the ongoing costs of using OpenAI's API. This motivated me to learn how to run AI models locally using technologies like llama.cpp and vLLM.

I experimented with tools like LMStudio for text and image recognition LLMs, and ComfyUI for image generation using various models.

I successfully got Gemma3 4B running on a VPS with 8GB of RAM and 6 ARM cores, which now automatically generates descriptions whenever a new image is added to the database.

Evolution

This project has evolved significantly over the years. The collection expanded by automatically extracting Pepe memes from additional Telegram channels and Twitter profiles.

As the project grew more complex, I decided to simplify it by removing some features. For instance, the automated scrapers for Telegram and Twitter have been disabled to keep the project more focused and maintainable.