AI file search for Windows and Mac.
By meaning. Privately.

Type it the way you would say it to a colleague, like “that tax document from last year”. BeaconFind reads what is inside your files, so tax_final_USE_THIS.pdf comes up first even though you never typed its name. The passage that matched is shown under each result, so you can see why it was found.

An image model looks at your photos, screenshots and scans, on your own machine. Describe what is in the frame, like “mountain sunset photo”, and the pictures come up as a grid of thumbnails. No tags, no albums, and no renaming IMG_4821 first.

Ask in a full sentence and get a written answer built from your own documents. Every statement carries a numbered source, and a click opens the file it came from. The answer is written by a language model running on your own machine, which takes a few seconds while it reads the pages.

Select a result and the file renders in the panel beside it: PDF pages, spreadsheets with their sheets, slides, images, audio and video. Your match is highlighted on the page it is actually on, and a short summary tells you what the document is about before you open anything.

Hybrid is the default and combines meaning with keywords. Switch to semantic, keyword or exact when you know what kind of match you want, then narrow by folder, file type, date or size. A combination you use often can be saved as a view and applied with one click.

Text recognition runs on your machine over screenshots and scanned PDFs, so the words in a picture are as searchable as the words in a document. Search for a phrase that only exists inside an image, like “router admin”, and Screenshot 2024-03-11 at 14.22.31.png turns up, with the recognised text in the result.

Add single folders, your home folders or the whole PCMac. Drag the queue into the order you want, schedule a big folder for tonight, and set the hours when indexing may run. After the first pass, a watcher picks up new and changed files by itself.

BeaconFind groups byte-identical copies and near-identical ones, like the four almost-the-same shots from a single burst. Each group shows how much space it wastes. The newest copy is kept, you tick the ones to remove, and they go to the Recycle BinTrash, so nothing is gone for good by accident.

Performance mode pauses indexing and background AI while search stays available. Gaming mode pauses everything, search included, and unloads the large AI models to free graphics memory for your game. Switch from the tray or the title bar, and back again when you are done.

Every model is downloaded once and then runs on your own hardware, on the graphics card when there is one. The index BeaconFind builds, and the database behind it, are encrypted with a key derived from this machine. Copy the folder to another computer and it cannot be read.

Press Ctrl+K⌥Space in any app and a search card floats over what you are doing. Type, press Enter, and the right file opens beside the results even when its name says nothing about what is inside. Escape puts it away and you are back where you were.

The same overlay answers questions in place. Each fact in the answer names the file it came from, and you can ask a follow-up in the same conversation. Close the overlay and the answer keeps being written in the background, ready when you come back.

Tabs for documents, images, videos and audio sit right under the search box, with the filters one click away. Pick a type, add a date or a size, and the results update in place. There is no settings page to visit in the middle of a search.

Type > in the search box and it turns into a command palette. Open Settings, Clear Search History and Open App Data Folder are a keystroke away, without touching a menu.

Work in progress Today, videos are found by their file name and the details stored inside them, like the title and the length: search “landing page demo” and VID_20240221_103355.mp4 comes up first, because that is its title, and it plays right in the preview. Coming next: searching by what is said in them, transcribed on your own machine.

Work in progress Today, songs and recordings are found by the tags inside them: title, artist, album, genre and year. Search “study music” and 01 Untitled.mp3 comes up, because its album is Late Study, and it plays right in the preview. Coming next: searching recordings by what is said in them, transcribed on your own machine.