SiftVid started as a personal tool. Tens of thousands of video files, zero good way to find them. Finder was useless. Windows Explorer was worse. Every commercial option was either overkill or wrong for local files. So we built the right thing.
You have a lot of video files. You know a specific clip exists — you remember watching it, you remember roughly when you added it — but your file manager has no idea what's in those files. Search returns nothing useful. You scroll. You give up.
SiftVid reads your filenames, extracts every meaningful token — names, tags, dates, categories, folder structure — and builds a searchable index entirely in your browser. Nothing leaves your machine unless you ask it to. Nothing is charged per-query. It is just fast, private search over your own files.
SiftVid is built for individual users who maintain large personal video libraries and need to find things quickly. The common thread: more files than any file manager can usefully show.
Before: 4,000 ceremony and reception clips spread across 12 wedding folders. Finding the right angle took 20 minutes.
After: Search “ceremony wide” and get every wide shot across all weddings in under a second.
Before: Game tape from three seasons, organised by date only. Finding plays by formation required watching hours of footage.
After: Tag clips by play type during import. Filter by tag and sort by duration to find the exact drill.
Before: Six hard drives of travel footage. Could never find the right clip because filenames were GoPro auto-generated codes.
After: Add tags on import. Random discovery resurfaces forgotten footage from trips years ago.
SiftVid does one thing: it helps you find videos you already own. It is not a streaming service, a marketplace, a sharing platform, or a subscription to someone else's library. Your files stay yours.
The free tier runs entirely in your browser with no server-side components at all. The paid tier adds an encrypted personal cloud — an extension of your own storage, not a new dependency. Either way, SiftVid staff cannot see your content.
Questions? Email us at support@siftvid.com. We reply within four hours on business days.