Clipto - Fully local, natural language search over terabytes of media
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Like Google Photos, but fully local. Turn the terabytes of video, audio, meetings, and files you work with into searchable memories, without uploading anything to the cloud. Clipto automatically tags people, dialogue, and scenes, so you can instantly find any moment buried in your media just by describing what you're looking for. It's fast too: on a MacBook Pro M5, Clipto indexed 2TB of videos in just 24 hours.


Replies
LobeHub
Just downloaded the Mac app—the UI is surprisingly clean for a local AI tool. How many languages does the transcription support currently?
Clipto
@amazing_1 Thanks, really glad you like the UI. We currently support transcription in 99+ languages, so it should work well for multilingual audio and video content across different workflows
That is good
But isnt it better to keep your data on cloud no one wants their system to have that much data
Clipto
@jay_gangwar Good question! That’s fair — cloud storage can be convenient, especially if you want everything synced across devices. But for a lot of filmmakers, editors, and creators, the problem is that raw footage is huge and often sensitive. Uploading terabytes of media can be slow, expensive, and not always something people are comfortable with. Clipto is built for the other workflow: your media already lives on your local drives, and the AI helps you make it searchable without uploading everything first. So it’s not really “cloud vs local” for everyone. If you prefer cloud storage, that can still work for you.:)
@matthewweiyeah people can have different use cases
This feels like what the Apple 'Photos' search should have been for professional video files. Super impressed.
Clipto
@limxn6 High praise — thank you. 😊
Apple Photos is great for memories. Clipto is built for work: terabytes of raw footage, interviews, production assets — all searchable locally, offline, instantly.
Glad it resonates. Let me know what you find when you try it.
Surgeflow
Clipto
@rocsheh Thanks, Zepeng!
Yes, Clipto already supports this today!
You can assign custom names to detected faces, so instead of searching for “a person”, you can search for people that actually matter to you, such as family members, friends, clients, or collaborators.
We’ve found that once people start organizing media around real identities, search becomes much more powerful. Instead of “find a woman speaking on stage,” you can search for things like “Mom’s speech”, “Client A interview”, or “John at the conference.”
We think that’s an important step toward turning media search into a true personal memory system.
I’m a YouTuber and managing b-roll is my biggest nightmare. Does Clipto allow for tagging, or is it all AI-based search?
Clipto
@song_kirby Totally feel you. Managing B-roll was my personal nightmare back when I was creating videos. It's actually one of the core reasons we built Clipto. It automatically analyzes and tags your footage across multiple dimensions — shot type, people, actions, dialogue, expressions, subjects and more. All AI, zero manual work. Your B-roll will become a fully searchable library.
And what makes it really special — at least for me personally — is this: when you're deep in an edit, you often need that one specific detail to nail the emotional continuity, the storytelling flow, or the movement between cuts. Something you half-remember from the shoot, or honestly didn't even notice you'd captured. Just describe it in plain language, and you'll find exactly what you need in seconds.
Hope Clipto will help you a lot:)
Very cool Idea!! If it woks fully in local, you must be using small LLM/VLM on local device. In that case do you see any memory Or CPU issues? How do you fix that ?
Clipto
@sabber_ahamed That's a great question.
First, choose a smaller model.
Second, slim it down through optimization.
Finally, schedule tasks flexibly based on how busy your computer is — that is, 'model miniaturization itself, compression optimization, and flexible task scheduling based on the user's machine usage.
the 'store everything but remember nothing' line is the whole thing imo. the part people underrate is that the hard bit was never the search, its doing the indexing on-device without melting the laptop or quietly shipping stuff to a server, which is exactly why most tools just punt it to the cloud. respect for taking the harder path. one thing im curious about: once the first 2TB is indexed, is re-indexing incremental as you add footage, or does it re-chew the whole library? thats kind of the thing that decides whether this stays usable for anyone whose archive keeps growing
Clipto
@dhanishta_likhar That’s a very insightful observation.
We actually agree with your premise. For local AI products, you have to solve the hardest problem first. If you can’t make large-scale on-device indexing practical, everything else is just a demo.
As for indexing, it’s incremental. Once your library has been processed, Clipto only analyzes newly added or changed files. It doesn’t re-chew the entire archive every time.
A lot of our engineering work has gone into task scheduling, indexing pipelines, and resource management to make sure growing libraries remain practical over time.
That’s ultimately the difference between a product that works for a 50GB library and one that can keep scaling as your archive grows year after year.
Zawa (formerly X-Design)
I’ve been looking for a way to search my local media assets without opening every single folder. This just saved me an hour of digging today.
Clipto
@mona_xx That’s exactly the problem we built Clipto for. 😄
Too often we know we have the clip somewhere, but finding it means opening folder after folder. Glad Clipto saved you an hour today!
Clipto
@kjlis Great questions!
For dialogue search, we support 100+ languages through our speech recognition pipeline, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and many others. As long as the language is supported by the underlying ASR models, the dialogue becomes searchable. Accuracy can vary by language, audio quality, accents, and recording conditions, but we’ve found it works very well across most major languages.
For compound queries, yes. We don’t treat search as simple keyword matching. We use semantic retrieval and reranking to understand the intent behind a query. For something like:
“Find clips that contain both X and Y”
clips matching both concepts would typically rank highest, while clips matching only X or only Y may still appear further down the results if they are semantically relevant. In practice, the system tries to optimize for the user’s intent rather than applying strict boolean logic.
We’d love to hear more about the workflows you’re thinking about. This is an area we’re actively improving.
Does it support video transcription search?
Clipto
@nithin_raju1 Yes, it does. Clipto supports video transcription search. Beyond transcription, AI can also generate a summary for your video. You can click into any single file to open its detail page, where you’ll see the transcript, summary, and a chat box. From there, you can ask questions about the video, and the AI will answer based on the content of that specific file:)