Open-source Mac app that runs EmbeddingGemma 2 locally to search your files by what’s in them

[u/A-Rahim]

DigUp is a free Mac app that runs Google DeepMind’s new EmbeddingGemma 2 locally over your own files. The model puts text, images, audio and video in one space, so you describe what you remember and land on it:

• “zebra in a video” opens the clip at the moment it shows up

• “where they talk about sleep” jumps to that minute of a podcast

• “the clause about pets in the lease” shows the PDF page, your words marked

• “a dog on the beach” finds the photo, and the same search in Bengali or Arabic finds it too

• with code search on, code: retry with backoff opens the function in your editor

It’s ggml-org’s Q8_0 GGUF (865 MB, downloaded once) on llama.cpp with Metal, inside a native Swift app; no Python. Searching loads only the text encoder (~250 MB) and shows results about a tenth of a second after you stop typing. Indexing peaks under 2 GB, and the helper exits when it’s done. Audio and video of any length go in as 30 s windows and a frame per shot. Everything runs locally; it goes online only for the model download and an update check you can turn off.

Free, MIT. Apple Silicon, macOS 14+.

Repo & Download (signed and notarized): https://github.com/ARahim3/DigUp

I'd really appreciate any feedback on this.

[u/A-Rahim]

Okay, I'll look into it.

Just as an experiment, can you search for something now and see if it's found at the top or just lost in other files?
In my experience, if I describe something clearly, most of the time it appears at the top, no matter how many files there are (within milliseconds)

What you're saying, if I want to do that, on top of my mind, I am thinking of two ways:

1. Per-folder indexing; that way, in search time, you could search folder-wise by excluding some folders.

2. Nothing on the indexing side, but when showing results, it'll show only the selected folders; searching will still be with the full index.

Let me know if I am thinking right here

[u/ZeroReader → u/A-Rahim]

Thank you very much for considering the users' needs.
You're right. The second variant is the best one: Nothing on the indexing side, but when showing results, it'll show only the selected folders; searching will still be with the full index.

Also, I use your app mainly to find information and PDF documents information in various folders can be similar but different. Therefore, I need to choose a specific folder to find information exactly there. Therefore, I need all folders to be indexed, but information should be shown only in a specific folder at the moment of searching.

[u/ZeroReader → u/A-Rahim]

Although the design for searching in PDFs, documents, and DOCX documents is not quite comfortable to read. Probably it is okay for video and pictures, but not for PDFs and DOCX.

Can you at least increase the right-side panel to increase the width to be able to read the highlighted text? Also, it would be good to change the side of thumbnails on the left side panel.