Inspiration
I built ArchiveMind because I had a drawer full of hard drives and could never find anything. I knew the files were there, but filenames and folder structures were often useless years later. I wanted a way to search my archive by what files actually contained instead of relying on remembering what I had named them.
What it does
ArchiveMind is a private, local-first desktop app that catalogs and searches large collections of files across folders, computers, and external hard drives.
Instead of forcing users to reorganize everything first, ArchiveMind indexes the files they already have and makes the archive searchable. The goal is simple: help people find files by what they contain, not just by filename.
ArchiveMind works locally, with no cloud storage required, no account, and no telemetry.
How I built it
ArchiveMind is built primarily in Python and uses SQLite with FTS5 for fast full-text search, along with LanceDB and local file extraction and indexing tools.
The desktop application uses pywebview to provide a native shell while keeping the search and cataloging system local to the user's computer.
I developed and tested ArchiveMind against my own real-world archive rather than a small demo collection.