Make your home videos and family photos searchable

Why family media is so hard to search

You remember a family video by what happened: the toast at the 60th birthday, the first time the dog saw snow, your dad telling the story about the army. Folders are organized by date or by device, if at all, and digitized tapes often come back as one long file per cassette.

Photo apps help with pictures, and some recognize faces. They don't search what people said in the videos.

The people who remember the stories behind the footage won't always be there to ask. Making the archive searchable is partly about convenience and partly about keeping those moments reachable for the next generation.

What people try

• Folders by year and event. Good discipline, and it breaks down when files come from five phones and a box of tapes.
• Cloud photo services. Convenient search, and it means uploading a family's entire history, including children, to a company's servers, often with storage fees that grow every year.
• Watching everything. Lovely, and not how you find one toast.

Search by what happened

Add your family folders to MediaFind and it indexes video, audio and photos on your computer. Speech is transcribed, so you can search “the story about Uncle Joe and the tractor”. Frames and photos are indexed by scene and objects, so “kids opening presents by the tree” or “birthday cake with candles” works too.

More ways in: search by color and mood, by the text in a photo (a sign, a banner, a handwritten card), or with a sample picture to find similar ones. With Pro, faces let you click a person and see every appearance across decades of photos and video. Face data stays on your computer, and you can switch it off or delete it all at any time.

Recorded family stories

Some of the most valuable family media is audio: a grandparent telling the story of how they emigrated, a voice memo from a wedding, a phone call someone happened to record. MediaFind transcribes these on your computer, labels who is speaking, and lets you name each voice once so it is recognized in other recordings.

Transcripts export as Word or PDF, which makes it easy to print a relative's stories for the rest of the family or keep them alongside the audio. At a family gathering, the mobile companion (beta, Android) can search your library from your phone over Wi-Fi while connected to MediaFind on your computer.

Getting old media in

1. Digitize tapes and film first. MediaFind reads files, not cassettes, and indexes MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and WebM video.
2. Gather photos in JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, TIFF or BMP, and voice memos in M4A, MP3, WAV or other common audio.
3. Add the folders. Chapters and summaries break a two-hour digitized tape into findable parts.
4. If you later move everything to a bigger drive, relink the library instead of starting over.

Sharing what you find

Cut a found moment into its own clip, or put several together in Create, the built-in editor, add titles and render an MP4 for a family gathering. With Pro, reels can gather every moment about a topic or tag into one video. Free exact-duplicate cleanup finds the same photo copied from three phones, and Pro adds near-duplicates and blurry shots, with everything going to a reversible quarantine before anything is deleted.

Nothing is uploaded to be indexed. Your family's media stays on drives you own. You can export the library as a portable ZIP to take it to another computer, while the originals stay where they are.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search home videos by what people said?

Yes. MediaFind transcribes speech in your videos and voice memos, so you can search for a story or a phrase and jump to the moment.

Can I find every photo and video of one person?

With Pro, face recognition finds every appearance of a person across photos and video. It runs on your computer and can be turned off or wiped at any time.

Does it work with digitized VHS tapes?

Yes, once the tapes are digitized to a supported video file such as MP4 or MOV. MediaFind does not capture from tape itself.

Are my family photos uploaded anywhere?

No. Indexing and search run on your computer, with no account required.

Can it clean up duplicate photos?

Exact duplicates are found for free. Pro adds near-duplicates and low-quality files, and every candidate goes to a reversible quarantine first.