dust42 a day ago

To add some numbers, on MBP M1 64GB with ggml-org/gemma-3-4b-it-GGUF I get

  25t/s prompt processing 
  63t/s token generation
Overall processing time per image is ~15secs, no matter what size the image is. The small 4B has already very decent output, describing different images pretty well.

Steps to reproduce:

  git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp.git
  cmake -B build
  cmake --build build --config Release -j 12 --clean-first
  # download model and mmproj files...
  build/bin/llama-server \
    --model gemma-3-4b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf \
    --mmproj mmproj-model-f16.gguf
Then open http://127.0.0.1:8080/ for the web interface

Note: if you are not using -hf, you must include the --mmproj switch or otherwise the web interface gives an error message that multimodal is not supported by the model.

I have used the official ggml-org/gemma-3-4b-it-GGUF quants, I expect the unsloth quants from danielhanchen to be a bit faster.

  • matja 13 hours ago

    For every image I try, I get the same response:

    > This image shows a diverse group of people in various poses, including a man wearing a hat, a woman in a wheelchair, a child with a large head, a man in a suit, and a woman in a hat.

    No, none of these things are in the images.

    I don't even know how to begin debugging that.

    • clueless 10 hours ago

      I get the same as well, instead I get this message, no matter which image I upload: "This is a humorous meme that uses the phrase "one does not get it" in a mocking way. It's a joke about people getting frustrated when they don’t understand the context of a joke or meme."

      Not sure why it's not working

    • exe34 13 hours ago

      Means it can't see the actual image. It's not loading for some reason.

      • aendruk 11 hours ago

        I’m having a hard time imagining how failure to see an image would result in such a misleadingly specific wrong output instead of e.g. “nothing” or “it’s nonsense with no significant visual interpretation”. That sounds awful to work with.

        • sigmaisaletter 9 hours ago

          LLMs have a very hard time saying "I am useless in this situation", because they are explicitly trained to be a helpful assistant.

          So instead of saying "I can't help you with this picture", the thing hallucinates something.

          That is the expected behavior by now. Not hard to imagine at all.

          • aendruk 9 hours ago

            No controls in the training data?

        • tough 9 hours ago

          Fun fact,you can prompt the llm's with no input and random nonsense will come out of them

  • zamadatix 16 hours ago

    Are those numbers for the 4/8 bit quants or the full fp16?

    • dust42 15 hours ago

      It is a 4-bit quant gemma-3-4b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf. I just use "describe" as prompt or "short description" if I want less verbose output.

      As you are a photographer, using a picture from your website gemma 4b produces the following:

      "A stylish woman stands in the shade of a rustic wooden structure, overlooking a landscape of rolling hills and distant mountains. She is wearing a flowing, patterned maxi dress with a knotted waist and strappy sandals. The overall aesthetic is warm, summery, and evokes a sense of relaxed elegance."

      This description is pretty spot on.

      The picture I used is from the series L'Officiel.02 (L-officel_lanz_08_1369.jpg) from zamadatix' website.

      • zamadatix 10 hours ago

        I'm can neither claim to be a photographer nor that https://www.dansmithphotography.com/ my website, but I appreciate the example! The specific photo for other's reference, based on the filename: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/15/509333/14386490/L-o...

        That said I'm not as impressed of the description. The structure has some wood but it's certainly not just wooden, there are distant mountains but not much in the way of rolling hills to speak of. The dress is flowing but the waist is not knotted - the more striking note might have been the sleeves.

        For 4 GB of model I'm not going to ding it too badly though. The question on which quant was mainly around the tokens/second angle (q4 requires 1/4th the memory bandwidth as the full model would) rather than quality angle. As a note: a larger multimodal model gets all of these points accurately (e.g. "wooden and stone rustic structure"), they aren't just things I noted myself.

    • refulgentis 12 hours ago

      n.b. the image processing is by a separate model, basically has to load the image and generate ~1000 tokens

      (source: vision was available in llama.cpp but Very Hard, been maintaining an implementation)

      (n.b. it's great work, extremely welcome, and new in that the vision code badly needed a rebase and refactoring after a year or two of each model adding in more stuff)

  • astrodude 12 hours ago

    do you have any example images it generated based on your prompts?

    want to have a look before I try

    • geoffpado 10 hours ago

      To be clear, this model isn't generating images, it's describing images that are sent to it.

danielhanchen a day ago

It works super well!

You'll have to compile llama.cpp from source, and you should get a llama-mtmd-cli program.

I made some quants with vision support - literally run:

./llama.cpp/llama-mtmd-cli -hf unsloth/gemma-3-4b-it-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl -1

./llama.cpp/llama-mtmd-cli -hf unsloth/gemma-3-12b-it-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl -1

./llama.cpp/llama-mtmd-cli -hf unsloth/gemma-3-27b-it-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl -1

./llama.cpp/llama-mtmd-cli -hf unsloth/unsloth/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl -1

Then load the image with /image image.png inside the chat, and chat away!

EDIT: -ngl -1 is not needed anymore for Metal backends (CUDA still yes) (llama.cpp will auto offload to the GPU by default!). -1 means all GPU layers offloaded to the GPU.

  • danielhanchen a day ago

    If it helps, I updated https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/gemma-3-how-to-run-and-fine-t... to show you can use llama-mtmd-cli directly - it should work for Mistral Small as well

    • distalx 10 hours ago

      Is there a simple GUI available for running LLaMA on my desktop that I can access from my laptop?

      • Devorlon 7 hours ago

        Give https://docs.openwebui.com/ a look, you'll be able to access it by using your desktops IP while on your laptop (providing you're on the same network).

      • tough 9 hours ago

        isnt that ollama + any client supporting it?

        using tailscale for the internal network works really well

  • thenameless7741 a day ago

    If you install llama.cpp via Homebrew, llama-mtmd-cli is already included. So you can simply run `llama-mtmd-cli <args>`

  • danielhanchen 19 hours ago

    Ok it's actually better to use -ngl 99 and not -ngl -1. -1 might or might not work!

  • raffraffraff a day ago

    I can't see the letters "ngl" anymore without wanting to punch something.

    • simlevesque 16 hours ago

      That's your problem. Hope you do something about that pent up aggressivity.

    • danielhanchen a day ago

      Oh it's shorthand for number of layers to offload to the GPU for faster inference :) but yes it's probs not the best abbreviation.

      • stavros 20 hours ago

        It probably isn't, not gonna lie.

ngxson a day ago

We also support SmolVLM series which delivers light-speed response thanks to its mini size!

This is perfect for real-time home video surveillance system. That's one of the ideas for my next hobby project!

    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM-Instruct-GGUF
    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct-GGUF
    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM-500M-Instruct-GGUF
    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct-GGUF
    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM2-256M-Video-Instruct-GGUF
    llama-server -hf ggml-org/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct-GGUF
  • a_e_k 21 hours ago

    I've been noticing your commits as I skim the latest git commit notes whenever I periodically pull and rebuild. Thank you for all your work on this (and llama.cpp in general)!

  • thatspartan 17 hours ago

    Thanks for landing the mtmd functionality in the server. Like the other commenter I kept poring over commits in anticipation.

  • moffkalast 16 hours ago

    Ok but what's the quality of the high speed response? Can the sub-2.2B ones output a coherent sentence?

simonw a day ago

This is the most useful documentation I've found so far to help understand how this works: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/tree/master/tools/mtmd...

  • scribu 17 hours ago

    It’s interesting that they decided to move all of the architecture-specific image-to-embedding preprocessing into a separate library.

    Similar to how we ended up with the huggingface/tokenizers library for text-only Tranformers.

banana_giraffe a day ago

I used this to create keywords and descriptions on a bunch of photos from a trip recently using Gemma3 4b. Works impressively well, including going doing basic OCR to give me summaries of photos of text, and picking up context clues to figure out where many of the pictures were taken.

Very nice for something that's self hosted.

  • accrual a day ago

    That's pretty neat. Do you essentially loop over a list of images and run the prompt for each, then store the result somewhere (metadata, sqlite)?

    • banana_giraffe a day ago

      Yep, exactly, just looped through each image with the same prompt and stored the results in a SQLite database to search through and maybe present more than a simple WebUI in the future.

      If you want to see, here it is:

      https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/f300149131c008798411aa3246...

      Here's an example of the kind of detail it built up for me for one image:

      https://imgur.com/a/6jpISbk

      It's wrapped up in a bunch of POC code around talking to LLMs, so it's very very messy, but it does work. Probably will even work for someone that's not me.

      • wisdomseaker a day ago

        Nice! How complicated do you think it would be to do summaries of all photos in a folder, ie say for a collection of holiday photos or after an event where images are grouped?

        • banana_giraffe a day ago

          Very simple. You could either do what I did, and ask for details on each image, then ask for some sort of summary of the group of summaries, or just throw all the images in one go:

          https://imgur.com/a/1IrCR97

          I'm sure there's a context limit if you have enough images, where you need to start map-reducing things, but even that wouldn't be too hard.

          • wisdomseaker a day ago

            Thanks for the reply, I'll see if I can work it out :)

            • sorenjan 16 hours ago

              You might want to extract the location from the image exif data and include in the prompt as well. There are reverse geocoding libraries and services that takes coordinates and return a city, which would probably make for a better summary of a trip.

  • buyucu 14 hours ago

    is gemma 4b good enough for this? I was playing with larger versions of gemma because I didn't think 4b would be any good.

    • banana_giraffe 9 hours ago

      It certainly seemed good enough for my use. I feed it some random images I found online, you can see the sort of metadata it outputs in a static dump here:

      https://q726kbxun.github.io/llama_cpp_vision/index.html

      It's not perfect, by any means, but between the keywords and description text, it's good enough for me to be able to find images in a larger collection.

thenthenthen 19 hours ago

What has changed in laymans terms? I tried llama.cpp a few months ago and it could already do image description etc?

simonw a day ago

llama.cpp offers compiled releases for multiple platforms. This release has the new vision features: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases/tag/b5332

On macOS I downloaded the llama-b5332-bin-macos-arm64.zip file and then had to run this to get it to work:

  unzip llama-b5332-bin-macos-arm64.zip
  cd build/bin
  sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine llama-server llama-mtmd-cli *.dylib
Then I could run the interactive terminal (with a 3.2GB model download) like this (borrowing from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43943370R)

  ./llama-mtmd-cli -hf unsloth/gemma-3-4b-it-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl 99
Or start the localhost 8080 web server (with a UI and API) like this:

  ./llama-server -hf unsloth/gemma-3-4b-it-GGUF:Q4_K_XL -ngl 99
I wrote up some more detailed notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/10/llama-cpp-vision/
  • ngxson a day ago

    For brew users, you can specify --HEAD when installing the package. This way, brew will automatically build the latest master branch.

    Btw, the brew version will be updated in the next few hours, so after that you will be able to simply "brew upgrade llama.cpp" and you will be good to go!

  • danielhanchen a day ago

    I'm also extremely pleased with convert_hf_to_gguf.py --mmproj - it makes quant making much simpler for any vision model!

    Llama-server allowing vision support is definitely super cool - was waiting for it for a while!

  • ngxson a day ago

    And btw, -ngl is automatically set to max value now, you don't need to -ngl 99 anymore!

    Edit: sorry this is only true on Metal. For CUDA or other GPU backends, you still need to manually specify -ngl

    • danielhanchen a day ago

      OH WHAT! So just -ngl? Oh also do you know if it's possible to auto do 1 GPU then the next (ie sequential) - I have to manually set --device CUDA0 for smallish models, and probs distributing it amongst say all GPUs causes communication overhead!

      • ngxson a day ago

        Ah no I mean we can omit the whole "-ngl N" argument for now, as it is internally set to -1 by default in CPP code (instead of being 0 traditionally), and -1 meaning offload everything to GPU

        I have no idea how to specify custom layer specs with multi GPU, but that is interesting!

        • danielhanchen a day ago

          WAIT so GPU offloading is on by DEFAULT? Oh my fantastic! For now I have to "guess" via a Python script - ie I sum sum up all the .gguf split files in filesize, then detect CUDA memory usage, and specify approximately how many GPUs ie --device CUDA0,CUDA1 etc

          • ngxson a day ago

            Ahhh no sorry I forgot that the actual code controlling this is inside llama-model.cpp ; sorry for the misinfo, the -ngl only set to max by default if you're using Metal backend

            (See the code in side llama_model_default_params())

            • danielhanchen a day ago

              Oh no worries! I re-edited my comment to account for it :)

nico a day ago

How does this compare to using a multimodal model like gemma3 via ollama?

Any benefit on a Mac with apple silicon? Any experiences someone could share?

  • ngxson a day ago

    Two things:

    1. Because the support in llama.cpp is horizontal integrated within ggml ecosystem, we can optimize it to run even faster than ollama.

    For example, pixtral/mistral small 3.1 model has some 2D-RoPE trick that use less memory than ollama's implementation. Same for flash attention (which will be added very soon), it will allow vision encoder to run faster while using less memory.

    2. llama.cpp simply support more models than ollama. For example, ollama does not support either pixtral or smolvlm

    • nolist_policy 20 hours ago

      On the other hand ollama supports iSWA for Gemma 3 while llama.cpp doesn't. iSWA reduces kv cache size to 1/6.

      • vlovich123 20 hours ago

        What’s iSWA? Can’t find any reference online

        • imtringued 19 hours ago

          Gemma 3 has some layers with a context size of 1024 tokens and others having full length. You need to read the Gemma technical report.

    • roger_ a day ago

      Won’t the changes eventually be added to ollama? I thought it was based on llama.cpp

      • diggan 18 hours ago

        As far as I understand (not affiliated, just a user who peeked at the code), Ollama started out using llama.cpp as a runner for everything. But eventually they wrote their own runner in Golang, which is where they add support for new models. So most models you run via Ollama uses llama.cpp, but new stuff their own Golang runner.

    • danielhanchen a day ago

      By the way - fantastic work again on llama.cpp vision support - keep it up!!

      • ngxson a day ago

        Thanks Daniel! Kudos for your great work on quantization, I use the Mistral Small IQ2_M from unsloth during development and it works very well!!

        • danielhanchen a day ago

          :)) I did have to update the chat template for Mistral - I did see your PR in llama.cpp for it - confusingly the tokenizer_config.json file doesn't have a chat_template, and it's rather in chat_template.jinja - I had to move the chat template into tokenizer_config.json, but I guess now with your fix its fine :)

          • ngxson a day ago

            Ohhh nice to know! I was pretty sure that someone already tried to fix the chat template haha, but because we also allow users to freely create their quants via the GGUF-my-repo space, I have to fix the quants produces from that source

gitroom a day ago

Man, the ngl abbreviation gets me every time too. Kinda cool seeing all the tweaks folks do to make this stuff run faster on their Macs. You think models hitting these speed boosts will mean more people start playing with vision stuff at home?

  • thenthenthen 14 hours ago

    For sure! Llama.cpp runs great on my 10 year old pc and m1 mac!

dr_kiszonka 19 hours ago

Are there any tools that leverage vision for UI development?

Use case: I am working on a hobby project that uses TS/React as frontend. I can use local or cloud LLMs in VSCode but even those with vision require that I take a screenshot and paste it to a chat. Ideally, I would want it all automated until some stop criterion is met (even if only n-iterations). But even an extension that would screenshot a preview and paste it to chat (triggered by a keyboard shortcut) would be a big time-saver.

a_e_k 21 hours ago

This is excellent. I've been pulling and rebuilding periodically, and watching the commit notes as they (mostly ngxson, I think) first added more vision models, each with their own CLI program, then unified those under a single CLI program and deprecated the standalone one, while bug fixing and improving the image processing. I'd been hoping that meant they'd eventually add support to the server again, and now it's here! Thanks!

gryfft a day ago

Seems like another step change. The first time I ran a local LLM on my phone and carried on a fairly coherent conversation, I imagined edge inference would take off really quickly at least with e.g. personal assistant/"digital waifu" business cases. I wonder what the next wave of apps built on Llama.cpp and its downstream technologies will do to the global economy in the next three months.

  • LPisGood a day ago

    The “global economy in three month is writing some checks that I don’t know all of the recent AI craze has been able to cash in three years.

    • ijustlovemath a day ago

      AI is fundamentally learning the entire conditional probability distribution of our collective knowledge; but sampling it over and over is not going to fundamentally enhance it, except to, perhaps, reinforce a mean, or surface places we have insufficiently sampled. For me, even the deep research agents aren't the best when it comes to surfacing truth, because the nuance of that is lost on the distribution.

      I think that if we're realistic with ourselves, AI will become exponentially more expensive to train, but without additional high quality data (not you, synthetic data), we're back to 1980s era AI (expert systems), just with enhanced fossil fuel usage to keep up with the TPUs. What's old is new again, I suppose!

      I sincerely hope to be proven wrong, of course, but I think recent AI innovation has stagnated in terms of new things it can do. It's a great tool, when you use it to leverage that distribution (eg, semantic search), but it might not fundamentally be the approach to AGI (unless your goal is to replicate what we can, but less spikey)

      • MoonGhost a day ago

        It's not as simple as stochastic parrot. Starting with definitions and axioms all theorems can be invented and proved. That's in theory, without having theorems in the training set. That's thinking models should be able to do without additional training and data.

        In other words way forward seems to be to put models in loops. Which includes internal 'thinking' and external feedback. Make them use generated and acquired new data. Lossy compress the data periodically. And we have another race of algorithms.

        • GTP 16 hours ago

          > Starting with definitions and axioms all theorems can be invented and proved

          This was the premise of symbolic AI, but this approach seems to have been abandoned now.

      • gryfft a day ago

        It doesn't have to be AGI to have a major economic impact. It just has to beat enough extant CAPTCHA implementations.

        • LPisGood 15 hours ago

          We can already do that today

babuloseo an hour ago

Someone ELI5 please or tldr

behnamoh a day ago

didn't llama.cpp use to have vision support last year or so?

  • breput a day ago

    Yes, but this is generalized so it was able to be added to the llama-server GUI as well.

  • danielhanchen a day ago

    Yes they always did, but they moved it all into 1 umbrella called "llama-mtmd-cli"!

mrs6969 a day ago

so image processing there but image generation isn't ?

just trying to understand, awesome work so far.

  • a2128 20 hours ago

    As far as I'm aware there are no open source LLMs that can generate images. There's image generation models like Stable Diffusion but those are not transformer language models so they'd be out of scope for the project

  • zozbot234 20 hours ago

    Do the underlying models support generation? If the support isn't there to begin with, the llama.cpp folks can't do anything about that.

  • Rastonbury 20 hours ago

    Generating images using chat seems cumbersome when you can do it directly with something like stable diffusion

bsaul 21 hours ago

great news ! sidenote : Does vision include the ability to read a pdf ?

  • diggan 17 hours ago

    Vision = visual, while PDF is a container of sorts, usually containing images and text. So I guess the short answer is: 50% yes, the other part you can use any LLM for.

    • bsaul 16 hours ago

      i'm asking because openai api has a special endpoint to deal with pdf, different from images.

      Which part of a pdf file can you use LLMs for ? Pdf is a binary format..

      • diggan 16 hours ago

        Yeah, that'd make sense, PDFs aren't images.

        PDF isn't really a binary format, it starts with a text header, structure is mostly text-based objects and you can parse many PDFs as plain-text. They tend to contain embedded binary data though, which is the specific part these vision models can help you with, assuming they're images. The rest a "normal" LLM can parse just fine.

yieldcrv 11 hours ago

Finally! Open source multimodal is so far behind closed source options that people don’t even try to benchmark

They’re still doing text and math tests on every new model because it’s so bad

nikolayasdf123 21 hours ago

finally! very important use-case! glad they added it!

jacooper 19 hours ago

Is it possible to run multimodal LLMs using their Vulkan backend? I have a ton of 4gb gpus laying around that only support vulkan.

  • buyucu 18 hours ago

    Yes, llama.cpp has very good Vulkan support.

buyucu a day ago

It was really sad when vision was removed back a while ago. It's great to see it restored. Many thanks to everyone involved!

nurettin a day ago

Didn't we already have vision via llava?

  • nikolayasdf123 21 hours ago

    no, it did not work in llama.cpp

    • woodson 16 hours ago

      Slight correction: It worked in llama.cpp via the CLI tools, but not in the llama-server (OpenAI API compatible interface).

    • nurettin 19 hours ago

      I remember it distinctly working.

      • buyucu 18 hours ago

        they deprecated it 1-1.5 years ago. it's not back.