SCM launches local AI search for photos and videos on macOS
SCM is a local-first search tool for macOS that allows users to search photos and video frames using plain language. The application runs entirely offline on the user's Mac, requiring no accounts, cloud uploads, or telemetry. It uses a local vision model, OCR, and Whisper for exact spoken-line search.
What you can do with it
AI at Work →Find text in screenshots with SCM
What you get You can transcribe and search dialogue.
Indexes and searches local photos and videos offline on macOS using AI models.
- Who for
- marketers and founders
- Cost
- free
- Effort
- minutes
Use it for
- Search local video scenes
- Find text in screenshots
- Transcribe and search dialogue
How to set it up · From the article
- Install via Homebrew using brew install --cask allenv0/scm/scm
- Import folders containing your photos and videos
- Type search queries in plain language to find matching visual or spoken content
Watch out Requires Apple Silicon and macOS 12 or higher
Key points from the news
- Runs entirely offline on macOS with no accounts, cloud uploads, or telemetry, performing all inference locally.
- Features multi-modal search including visual match, OCR text search, and exact dialogue retrieval using Whisper.
- Supports four switchable models via ONNX Runtime and an opt-in llama.cpp sidecar for local chat.
The tool features automatic library maintenance, watched folders, and deduplication via SHA-256 content hashing. It supports four switchable models via ONNX Runtime, with a default CLIP model requiring a one-time download of approximately 435MB. Users can also opt in to a llama.cpp sidecar for local chat querying over extracted evidence. SCM can be installed on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 12+ via Homebrew.
Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS
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