AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built a desktop app that indexes your media locally

This is a mac app that supports local media indexing, text-to-audio transcription, and video-to-text generation with VEO 3.1 The app runs offline and lets you index local and external drives without needing to upload your content to the cloud. To use VEO you'll need an internet connection and your own API key. We're only supporting Silicon Macs right now, but would consider Intel and Windows releases if there's interest. Price is $19.99 for a lifetime license that includes future updates. If you have any feedback or want to join our discord, drop me a comment. Demo:…

Cosmos is a desktop application that creates a local index of your media files. It allows users to organize and search through their personal media collection stored on their computer. The app works entirely on-device… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1. 1
   I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust▲597

   A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…

   2025 · desktopdocs.com · its alternatives →

2. 2
   I completed shipping my desktop app▲526

   Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video…

   2025 · pimosa.app · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Clipto MCP▲655

   Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…

   Aug 2026 · clipto.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Cosmos Video 3.0▲458

   A meetings tool to create visibility & a sense of belonging

   2022 · cosmos.video · its alternatives →

5. 5
   AI Playground▲159

   Finding notes fast is still hard. You can organize with tags, PARA, or backlinks, but searching always feels slow and frustrating. That’s why I built ConniePad - native app on macOS & iOS. It works offline and lets you capture notes quickly anywhere. It has a comprehensive editor and local speech-to-text on iOS, so you can jot down ideas even without internet. But capturing notes is only half the story. What about finding what you need? ConniePad uses AI search. You can type queries like you would in Google or ChatGPT. It understands similar words, wrong typos, and abbreviations, so you get…

   2025 · veed.io · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Cosmos – Use AI to organize your videos▲20

   Try our powerful search directly from the landing page!

   2023 · golivecosmos.com · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Cosmos▲114

   Cosmos is a iOS music player totally free and open-source

   2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

8. 8OD
   Omi Desktop▲279

   Ask your Mac anything you saw or heard

   Sep 2026 · api.omi.me · its alternatives →

9. 9
   MediaOptim▲92

   Compress images, video & audio locally and save storage

   May 2026 · mediaoptim.com · its alternatives →

10. 10
    TinyFast▲319

    I am a developer. I have been building stuff for the last 13 years. One common challenge in all my projects is compressing assets to make them as small as possible. I used to end up using online compressors, but this has a lot of privacy concerns. So, I finally set down for couple of weeks and built this simple app. I can just drag and drop assets in it and it shrinks them. It currently supports around 25 file types. I built a lot of iOS apps but this is the first time building a macOS app, so any feedback is welcome.

    2025 · tinyfast.app · its alternatives →

11. 11
    AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS▲183

    Deep AI search for every photo and every frame of video in any folder on macOS - allenv0/SCM

    20d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Cosmos▲2

    AI file organizer that learns from you — 100% on your Mac

    Feb 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Cai▲179

    Hi HN, Cai runs actions on your selection via ⌥C, pick an action (AI, shell, GitHub issue, Linear ticket), done. Bundled local model (MLX Community), create custom actions with prompts, scripts and more. Free, MIT. Built after my Raycast extension sat in review queue for 3+ months. Wanted no typing, no app switching, no cloud. Repo: https://github.com/cai-layer/cai Demo: https://youtu.be/LH2MYNQ_wsk

    Apr 2026 · getcai.app · its alternatives →

14. 14IM
    I made a tool to save multimedia from various platforms▲69

    My goal is to create a free media downloader that doesn't bother you. friendly, efficient, and has no paywalls or anything like that. I've been working on that for the last 3 weeks or so, it's not perfect yet, but it works, and I'm really excited to share it.

    2025 · saveplays.com · its alternatives →

15. 15
    Edit Mind▲115

    Local-first AI video knowledge base. Search every frame with natural language, send clips to your NLE, and never lose track of your footage again. Designed for video editors, content creators, and visual storytellers.

    May 2026 · edit-mind.com · its alternatives →

16. 16
    Invenio▲74

    Local AI search for Mac video & photo libraries

    May 2026 · getinvenio.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    Cosmic CLI▲117

    Hi HN, I'm Tony, founder of Cosmic (a headless CMS). We just open-sourced a CLI that covers the full lifecycle of a content-driven app from creating the content model to deploying to production to updating the codebase all without leaving the terminal. Here's what the full workflow looks like: # Create a project with an AI-generated content model cosmic projects create # → "A recipe blog with recipes, categories, and authors" # Generate content cosmic content -p "Create 5 recipes with images across different categories" # Build a full-stack app wired to your content cosmic build -p "A modern…

    Feb 2026 · cosmicjs.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    Video Commander▲87

    I've been building open-source tools in the video/multimedia space for 10+ years. Finally shipped the commercial product I always wanted to exist — Video Commander, a desktop app that consolidates FFmpeg, ffprobe, MediaInfo, VMAF and more into a single workspace where you can inspect, encode and analyze video. Built with Tauri + Rust backend, React frontend. FFmpeg and VMAF. Not a cool AI/LLM project, just a tool I've been heads-down building over the last six months. Happy to answer any questions!

    Apr 2026 · video-commander.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Mirowl▲96

    Search all your screenshots via a local OCR-powered AI

    Jun 2026 · mirowl.com · its alternatives →

20. 20MG
    macOS GUI for running LLMs locally▲58

    Hello HN, I've been working on this project for a while, and it has been in an "open" beta for some time. I finally believe it's ready for its first release. I hope you like it. Here are some potential questions that may arise: 1. How does it compare to LM Studio? It's likely that if you're already using LM Studio, you'll continue to do so. This project is designed to be more user-friendly. 2. Is it open-source? No, it is not. 3. Does it use any open-source libraries? Yes, it uses llama.cpp and a few others, as indicated in the license information included with the application. 4. Why is not…

    2023 · avapls.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Semantic Video Search▲62

    Hi HN, I am Anubhav from Ramanlabs. We have been working on a native gui application to allow users to search any video data( mp4, mkv) or video streams (http/rtsp) using computer vision. Application is supposed to work like a video player which displays decoded frames and recognizes objects concurrently, making it an interactive experience. It works in super real-time and only expects a quad-core CPU with AVX2 instructions at minimum. Application is free to download (without any signup/account). We are only supporting WINDOWS for now [0]. Even though this is a binary application,…

    2022 · ramanlabs.in · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Local text, image, video, music and 3D from one CLI, no Python▲16

    Hi HN! I'm the author of mere.run a local first inference runtime built around an installable CLI. I believe that whenever possible we should use the stuff we already own (like our Mac laptops, decent machines gathering dust, our gaming PC) and the limited electrical power we have easy access to, like the socket in the wall next to most of us. We shouldn't have to send our data to the cloud hoping some T&C will prevent it from being used in a way that we'd regret. Most of the local AI solutions are technical, involved, and land a curious body in some package hell. People are optimizing for…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    Transcript-based video editor that runs 100% locally on Mac▲16

    Hi HN! I made ScriptEdit, a free Mac app that lets you edit videos by editing their transcripts. Everything runs locally on your machine. Think of Descript but free, local, and no long lags for video uploads or file / time limits. How it works: * You import videos, then ScriptEdit generates a transcript using Whisper (you can choose model). * Then you edit the text and the video cuts automatically match your edits. * Delete words to remove sections, rearrange sentences to reorder clips. * You can 'delete all filler words' or 'delete all gaps' to get much more professional videos without…

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    Run AI chat, image gen, vision, and voice offline on your Mac▲11

    Your Mac can run AI that holds its own against cloud models for the everyday stuff: chatting, making images, reading documents, transcribing voice. The hardware got there a while ago. The software to actually use it locally mostly didn't, so I built Off Grid. Download a model and it all runs on your machine. Ask it something on a flight with no wifi. Summarize a confidential document that never leaves your laptop. Run a hundred image generations in a loop and pay nothing, because it's your own GPU doing the work. Swap your paid dictation app for local Whisper. Talk through a coding problem…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →