diff --git a/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/page.js b/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/page.js
index 7f6c91fec..4cb7acb17 100644
--- a/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/page.js
+++ b/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/page.js
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ import { ImageGrid } from './components/ImageGrid';
 export default function Home() {
 
   // Application state
+  const [ready, setReady] = useState(null);
   const [images, setImages] = useState(null);
   const [currentImage, setCurrentImage] = useState(null);
 
@@ -24,9 +25,12 @@ export default function Home() {
     }
     const onMessageReceived = (e) => {
       switch (e.data.status) {
+        case 'initiate':
+          setReady(false);
+          break;
         case 'ready':
+          setReady(true);
           break;
-
         case 'complete':
           setImages(e.data.output);
           break;
@@ -50,6 +54,11 @@ export default function Home() {
     <main className="mx-auto max-w-[1960px] p-4 relative">
       <Modal currentImage={currentImage} setCurrentImage={setCurrentImage} />
       <SearchBar search={search} />
+      {ready === false && (
+        <div className="z-10 fixed top-0 left-0 w-full h-full bg-black bg-opacity-50 flex items-center justify-center">
+          <div className="text-white text-2xl font-bold">Loading model and database...</div>
+        </div>
+      )}
       <ImageGrid images={images} setCurrentImage={setCurrentImage} />
     </main>
   )
diff --git a/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/worker.js b/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/worker.js
index 6cc3427e9..977edf846 100644
--- a/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/worker.js
+++ b/examples/semantic-image-search-client/src/app/worker.js
@@ -16,13 +16,13 @@ class ApplicationSingleton {
     static metadata = null;
     static embeddings = null;
 
-    static async getInstance() {
+    static async getInstance(progress_callback = null) {
         // Load tokenizer and text model
         if (this.tokenizer === null) {
-            this.tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(this.model_id);
+            this.tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(this.model_id, { progress_callback });
         }
         if (this.text_model === null) {
-            this.text_model = CLIPTextModelWithProjection.from_pretrained(this.model_id);
+            this.text_model = CLIPTextModelWithProjection.from_pretrained(this.model_id, { progress_callback });
         }
         if (this.metadata === null) {
             this.metadata = getCachedJSON(this.BASE_URL + 'image-embeddings.json');
@@ -74,7 +74,10 @@ function cosineSimilarity(query_embeds, database_embeds) {
 self.addEventListener('message', async (event) => {
     // Get the tokenizer, model, metadata, and embeddings. When called for the first time,
     // this will load the files and cache them for future use.
-    const [tokenizer, text_model, metadata, embeddings] = await ApplicationSingleton.getInstance();
+    const [tokenizer, text_model, metadata, embeddings] = await ApplicationSingleton.getInstance(self.postMessage);
+
+    // Send the output back to the main thread
+    self.postMessage({ status: 'ready' });
 
     // Run tokenization
     const text_inputs = tokenizer(event.data.text, { padding: true, truncation: true });