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.

The place stored in a photo becomes a dot on a map and a filter. Search “holiday photos”, open the map and pick Sydney: its seven photos line up beside the map, and Sydney becomes a filter on the search. Places are looked up on your own machine, from a map that comes with the app.

BeaconFind groups the faces in your photos on your own machine. Give a group a name, like Peggy Whitson, and her photos are found by her name: type @ and the name in the search box, or pick her from the Person filter. People is off until you turn it on, on the Balanced and Max tiers.

Ask in a full sentence and get a written answer built from your own documents. The answer names the file it came from, the documents it read are listed under it as numbered sources, and a click opens any of them. 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, place, 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 what a screenshot says, like “home network name”, and Screenshot 2024-03-11 at 14.22.31.png turns up first, with the recognised text, HomeNet-5G, 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 four almost-the-same versions of one picture. 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.

Videos are found by their file name and the details stored inside them, like the title and the length: search “a little smoke” under Videos and Book club reading clip.mp4 comes up, because that is part of its title, and it plays right in the preview. Since 1.4.0, with transcription on (Settings > AI & Models: Off, Fast or Accurate), the words spoken in a video are searchable too, transcribed on your own machine, and the transcript sits under the player.

Songs and recordings are found by the tags inside them: title, artist, album, genre and year. Search “heart of a mystery” under Audio and Book club reading.mp3 comes up, its artist, album and genre shown above the player, and it plays right in the preview. Since 1.4.0, with transcription on (Settings > AI & Models: Off, Fast or Accurate), a recording is also found by the words spoken in it.

Speech in recordings and videos is transcribed on your own machine, so a word said in passing is as searchable as a word in a document. Search “eternity” and Book club reading.mp3 comes up with the line that says it, and the preview opens at 0:31, where it is said. Every line of the transcript carries its time: click one to jump there.