Last week I helped a client find materials — 40 minutes hunting through my hard drive until my eyes went blurry
Last week I spent 40 minutes digging through my hard drive hunting for a screenshot from last year for a client. My eyes were shot by the end — she ended up just re-taking it herself.
That feeling of "I know I screenshotted this somewhere, but I can't find it" — you ever get that?
What this tool is, and who's already using it
It's called SCM (Semantic Content Management), an open-source project on GitHub that runs on Mac. You type a sentence describing a scene — like "the moment the client holds up their phone to pay" — and it searches your entire hard drive. Not matching filenames — it actually "understands" every image and every video frame.
I saw a comment on HN from a guy named Marcus, an indie documentary filmmaker. He said his footage library has over 8,000 4K clips, and previously finding one frame meant scrubbing through tags in his editing software. After installing this, he just types "old man walking in the rain" and the frame shows up instantly.
Running locally means your client screenshots, product images, internal docs never touch any cloud — anyone handling sensitive commercial assets will appreciate this. I also got burned once uploading client materials to a third-party tool by mistake, so now I'm extra sensitive to the word "local."
What it costs to set up today
Money: Free. Open source.
Time: Setup takes about 20 minutes, but you'll need to give it time to index everything on your drive (a few thousand images might take 1-2 hours, but it runs in the background — won't block your work).
Technical barrier: You need to install Python and run one command line. If you've never touched the terminal, ask a tech-savvy friend to help, or follow the README video step by step — don't try to figure this out on a workday.
First step: Go to GitHub, search SCM, hit the green Code button to download, or copy the repo URL and clone it via command line.
Real talk — if you have fewer than 500 files on your computer, clear folder names + good file naming will do the job. This tool mainly solves the "my media library is so messy I don't even want to look at it" situation. No rush if that's not you yet.
What to pick based on where you are
If you're just starting out (0-500 assets): Don't bother yet. Clear file names and folder-by-client/project structure beats any AI. Wait until you genuinely feel "scrolling through folders is killing me" before coming back to this.
If you have 1-2 long-term clients (500-5,000 assets): Worth a try. Install once, and the time saved on every future search slowly adds up. Pick a weekend afternoon for setup — don't fiddle with it during a workday crunch.
If you're scaling up (5,000+ assets or a team): This tool will hold you for a while, but it's time to think bigger — like a shared team asset library, or a workflow for tagging materials. It's currently more suited for solo local use; team collaboration has to wait.