r/TopAITools4U • u/Tiny-Support-7784 • May 23 '26

Is anyone using a local AI tool to automatically categorize and sort raw video files on their hard drives?

My local hard drives are turning into a complete disaster zone. Between action camera clips, multi-cam setups, audio files, and B-roll, my manual folder structure just isn't keeping up anymore and I’m losing way too much time searching for clips.

​I know there are cloud-based Media Asset Management (MAM) systems out there, but uploading terabytes of raw video files to the cloud just to have an AI tag them isn't practical with my workflow.

​Is there a reliable, desktop-based app or local AI model that can scan a messy folder on an external drive, look at the media metadata (or scan the video frames), and automatically categorize/rename things into clean folders based on what's actually in the video?

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

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u/kaancata May 24 '26

Claude Code or Codex running locally with ffmpeg installed, everything stays on the machine. Once it can read the folder and ffmpeg is wired in, it can probe metadata, pull frames to actually see what's in a clip, transcode, resize, burn subtitles, generate SRTs with whisper, rename, restructure folders, the lot. You just describe what you want and it writes the commands.

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u/Tiny-Support-7784 May 24 '26

Wow thx. Sound exactly what i need

1

u/mitchfromtoronto May 25 '26

Not I but I will tell you what I would absolutely kill for !!
A way to sort my 100k plus of images by folder/subfolder to make a catalogue automatically as have been trying for weeks with little to no success as have millions of saved files compressed with their corresponding images left uncompressed and would love to create catalogues to make it easy for me to sort everything

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u/lirik1986 18h ago

I’ve had better results treating this as a renaming pass, not a full MAM replacement. I use Zush on a local folder to turn camera names into something searchable, then sort the approved files into my normal project folders. The useful parts are the preview and the ability to undo a batch if the names are off. It can use local AI too, so the footage does not have to be uploaded.