Show HN: I made a Mac app to search my images and videos locally with ML

Show HN: I made a Mac app to search my images and videos locally with ML desktopdocs.com...

Desktop Docs is a Mac app that lets you search all your photos and videos in seconds with AI.

Once you find the file you're looking for you can resize it, export it to Adobe Premiere Pro, or drag and drop it into another app.

I built Desktop Docs because I keep tons of media files on my computer and I can never remember where I save stuff (lots of screenshots, memes, and downloads). The Apple Photos app also only supports photos in your iCloud.

Desktop Docs supports adding folders or individual files to an AI Library where you can search by the contents of your files, not just file titles.

You can search by objects ("cardboard box"), actions ("man smiling", "car driving"), by emotion ("surprised woman", "sad cowboy"), or the text in the frame (great for screenshots or memes).

It's also 100% private. Make any media searchable without it ever leaving your computer.

How I built it: - 100% Javascript (I'm using Electron JS and React JS). - Embedding generation (CLIP from OpenAI is used to compute the image embeddings and text embeddings for user queries). - Redis (storing and doing KNN search on the embeddings with this DB). - Image/video editing (the app ships with FFmpeg binaries to explode videos into individual frames and scale images).

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIUgPNHOKKc

If there are any features you'd like to see in Desktop Docs or want to learn more about how I built it, drop me a comment below. Happy to share more.

Not sure how much low-level filesystem access you'd need, but it would be cool to support adding metadata via tags, a la

https://github.com/jdberry/tag/

ryandrake · a year ago

Adding on to this, it would be cool if it operated directly on the filesystem rather than having to first add everything to an intermediate "library". It's kind of a minor thing but definitely a pet peeve of mine when apps graft their own concept of a "library" onto my own perfectly working filesystem.

Demo looks neat though. I wonder if it can tell me which of my video files are SD, HD, and 4K. I've ripped so much media that I've lost track and did not name my files in such a way that it's obvious what resolution each one is. Something like that probably doesn't even need AI, just a peek at the existing metadata.

correa_brian · a year ago

Indexing file metadata is on the roadmap. Right now Desktop Docs will render file metadata (resolution, file size, duration), but planning on making this a searchable field.

dylan604 · a year ago

This is why I still use Bridge over Lightroom for a lot of my daily interacting with files. I don't always create an LR project. I just want to edit one or two files. So I love this feature as well.

einsteinx2 · a year ago

For checking the video resolutions, ffprobe should do what you want (a tool that’s part of ffmpeg). Combined with the find command you should be able to do it in one line.

idiotlogical · a year ago

I use get-video-properties python library for metadata harvesting. Works great

correa_brian · a year ago

There's support for adding your own tags to files if you'd like. The tags aren't auto-generated but I've considered adding some classification features to support something like "suggested tags."

saagarjha · a year ago

On macOS you can just attach metadata to files directly so Spotlight can index it.

edude03 · a year ago

Some feedback - for me (and probably for the HN crowd) saying it's powered by "AI" takes away credibility from what otherwise seems like a reasonable project.

My first impression was that you'd "just" upload my pictures to OpenAI with a prompt and call it a day.

Maybe highlight that it uses ML running locally? (I see that it's in the FAQ, but in the title)

mr_spothawk · a year ago

> highlight that it uses ML running locally

I'd love to know the specifics. if there's an installable, reproducible local build w/ regular model/updates/maintenance that I could subscribe to, I'd be an interested party to a tool like that.

Thanks for the feedback and for taking a look. I think that's a fair point.

SkyMarshal · a year ago

One other bit of feedback on the website - consider moving the Buy button to a persistent menu bar at the top, so you don't have to intersperse it throughout the product info flow. The first time I came to the buy button, I clicked it, not being ready to buy, but not realizing there was still a ton more product info further down the page.

Apple is a good example: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

jonathankoren · a year ago

Oh my god! A locally run one time purchase application!

I'm so glad someone remembers how software is supposed to work.

Thanks.

Someone's gotta do it :)

gedy · a year ago

This is cool, although FYI that Finder & Spotlight does have some support for this already since Ventura:

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/06/11/new-spotlight-features-in-...

miles · a year ago

FTA: "macOS Ventura allows Spotlight to find images in your iCloud Drive, Photos, Messages, Notes and Finder, making it very easy to find the media that you are looking for. Apple says that it can even detect images based on the content like 'dog in car'."

I haven't been able to get this to work in Finder; can you please share which search attribute you're using?

In Finder, there is the search box in upper right. Type something like "Blue shirt", and one of the options that pops below the box will be: "Content: Contains 'Blue shirt'"

It should do a visual search for some common things, as well as OCR in image text.

Nice. I didn't know Spotlight could do that. Does it also work on your local photos and videos that are not in iCloud?

Yes has local support, I never enable iCloud images

blacksmith_tb · a year ago

balls187 · a year ago

Just a heads up, im in the US, and when I click the link to buy, the price is $24.99

I'd personally love it if this also indexed text files and pdfs.

stork19 · a year ago

The search bar in Finder does a decent job searching for text (recursively) in files and PDFs.

pps · a year ago

This app focuses on semantic search rather than full-text search, if I understand correctly.

I'm thinking of adding support for text files. Only thing holding me back is that it would make the app much larger.

I'm also considering making the models more a la carte so you can manage which ones your want to use depending on your use case. That way you could use for text, image/video, or both.

How so? Indexing text seems fairly straightforward?

mjyoon · a year ago

Yeah, I'd love an app on Windows that can index text files, images, and pdfs recursively through a directory.

stevenicr · a year ago

Same - I kicked the tired with "Image Scan OCR" from the windows app store I think.. it can do a whole folder (batch process) of pics and extract the text into the sidebar, which is nice.. but it would be nice if the text was exported into a searchable thing and the text was linked to the pic/filename it came from..

Of course I want to search for data in my photo downloads / screenshots folders and be able to pull / easily grab / copy the pic(s) to another folder or upload to a site and then paste the text..

I guess chaining this into notion / obsidian or similar would be beneficial as well.

I'm working on a Windows version! I'll let you know when it's ready.

illusive4080 · a year ago

Would you consider a trial that can ingest 100 images? I’d like to try it before buying.

Appreciate you checking it out! I'm not offering a free trial at the moment, but I'll definitely let you if that changes.

Thanks!

robxorb · a year ago

Very interested in an app of this kind, but wouldn't buy it without trialing on my data. Too many content-specific gotcha's could render it ineffective, amazing or anywhere in-between.

A time-based trial could be good in that respect, and as a benefit for the developer gets a satisfied user hooked-in and not wanting to lose access.

Understood. Thanks for checking it out. I'm not not offering a free trial, but can let you know if that changes.

dcreater · a year ago

Yeah need to be able to try before buying. Vanilla CLIP isn't as great as advertised

Sorry what’s CLIP stand for?

fersarr · a year ago

same here

vintagedave · a year ago

I have a large on-disk photos library (in the Apple Photos app.) I have a lot of semi-duplicate photos. The main deduplicator software I tried can detect near-duplicates well (eg visually similar photos taken a fraction of a second apart) but it doesn't choose the best one to keep: it will suggest to keep a version where people have their eyes closed, and delete one with eyes open, for example. Could AI make a better choice there?

A reliably good app that helps me delete duplicates and shrink the photo library size would be amazing. Could this do something along those lines?

Similarly, I want to delete low quality images: blurred, etc. I don't know of an app that does that.

One other note - I saw another comment that your AI model runs on CPU. Does it run well or better on the M1 or newer? That is, can you market it as an Apple Silicon-only app?

It runs on both intel and Apple chips. I do think it's a bit faster on the silicon macs.

AuryGlenz · a year ago

I don’t know if it’s quite what you’re looking for but there are plenty of AI photo culling software choices for photographers.

Do you have a recommendation? I'm using Photosweeper currently.

Lots of articles online that look like semi-blogspam, and I'll go through each product in them... but if someone has a specific human-powered recommendation I'll happily listen :)

Dead Comment

thealistra · a year ago

Just a legal question. Can it really be non refundable? Aren’t there markets where regulators would require for you to refund?

prepend · a year ago

Is OP in those markets?

I think practically it doesn’t matter. This is two people selling something for $20 (or maybe $50, I can’t tell). They tell you beforehand, so you know. It’s unlikely they operate in jurisdictions that force software to be refundable. So I guess you can sue them to get your money back. Or chargeback through your credit card.

This is why we can’t have nice things. I miss the old internet where it was just people sending small amounts of money to other people for cool things (people mailed me checks in 1996). And users didn’t have the expectation of legal expenses to account for unlikely edge cases.

aaronbasssett · a year ago

Whether it's legal or not is really a moot point. They're using Stripe to take payments, which will close a merchant's account if they get too many chargebacks.

IMHO, it would be better to eat a few refunds than risk changing my payment provider.

I'd love it if someone paid me with a check.

Just trying to build cool stuff and put it out there into the world.