I built a local AI search app because I never organize my photos/videos

I take way too many photos and videos.

Trips, my dog, product demos, random screen recordings, screenshots, old clips I thought I’d use later… they all end up scattered across my Mac, external drives, Downloads, Desktop, and folders with names like “new stuff” or “to sort later”.

Of course, I never sort them later. The annoying part is that I usually remember the thing itself, not the filename. I’ll remember something like: “the video where my dog was running on the beach”. But Finder search doesn’t really help unless I remember the filename or some exact keyword.

I also didn’t want to upload all of this to some cloud AI tool. A lot of these files are personal. Photos, videos, recordings, screenshots, random docs. Even if an AI assistant like Codex could help me organize them, I didn’t feel great about handing over my whole messy archive.

So I started building Unfoldly.

It’s a local-only AI search app (open-sourced) for macOS. You point it at a folder or drive, it indexes your files locally, and then you can search by describing what you remember.

For example:

“find videos of my dog”
“show me screenshots about Stripe setup”
“find the PDF that mentioned pricing strategy”
“find the audio recording from the investor meeting”
“show me the clip where I presented the demo”

Once you find something, you can also ask follow-up questions about the file or folder, kind of like NotebookLM, but for your own local files. The main thing is: files stay on your device.

No account (and free).
No cloud upload.
No sending private photos, videos, recordings, or docs to someone else’s server.

It’s still early, but the itch is real for me: I want AI search for my own files, without giving up privacy just to find a video from three years ago.

If you want to try it:

GitHub:
https://github.com/Unary-Works/Unfoldly

Website/download:
https://www.unfoldly.io/