Install Yellide

Two minutes. You will not need a terminal, and you will never type a file path.

Before you start

You need Claude Desktop — the app, not the website. A website cannot read files on your computer, so it cannot help you find your footage.

Install

Download Yellide
Version 0.9.11, about 45 KB. Everything Yellide does happens on your machine.
It saves as yellide-0.9.11.mcpb — if an older number is sitting in your Downloads or on your Desktop, that is not this one.
Drag the file onto the Claude Desktop window.
Or: Settings → Extensions → Advanced settings → Install Extension…
You will see a red warning. Read it, then click Install Anyway.

“Installing will grant this extension access to everything on your computer. Any developer information shown has not been verified by Anthropic.”

That is true, and it is true of every local extension — including Anthropic’s own Filesystem one. It appears because we have not paid for a code-signing certificate, not because anything is wrong.

What Yellide actually does, which you can check for yourself in the source:
- Reads metadata headers, plus the first and last megabyte of each file to identify it
- Never modifies, moves, renames or deletes anything
- Makes no network calls
- Skips iCloud and Dropbox placeholder files rather than downloading them
This is the screen. Install is top right, and the warning below it is the one described above — it appears for every unsigned local extension.
Quit Claude Desktop and open it again.
Cmd-Q, not just closing the window. Extensions load at startup.

Now just ask

“What media files do I have on this Mac?”

Yellide finds your photos and videos by itself and starts indexing. Within seconds you can search by date, camera, folder and location. Then it will offer to look at your pictures and describe what is in them, so you can search for what things are rather than what they are called.

“Find the cycling event” · “What did I shoot in March 2020?”

“Show me everything from the D610” · “Open that one”

One setting worth changing

By default Claude asks permission every single time it uses one of Yellide’s thirteen tools. Indexing and describing an archive is hundreds of calls, so you will spend the evening clicking Allow.

Go to Settings → Extensions → Yellide → Configure, find Tool permissions, and switch the group from Needs approval to Always allow.

This is a real permission and worth understanding rather than clicking through. Yellide reads your files and never writes to them, makes no network calls, and skips cloud placeholders. Everything it can do is on the privacy page and in the source. If you would rather keep approving each call, that works too — it is only tedious, not broken.

Already have it? Upgrading

Upgrading is the same three steps, with one difference that catches people:

Download the new file and drag it on as before.
The filename carries the version — yellide-0.9.11.mcpb. If the number is lower than the one on this page, it is a stale download.
The button now says Update, not Install Anyway.
Dragging the file only shows you a preview of it. The preview shows the new version’s name and icon, which makes it look as though the update already happened. Nothing changes until you click Update.
Quit with Cmd-Q and reopen.
Until you do, Claude Desktop keeps running the old code.

Check it worked at Settings → Extensions → Yellide: the version under Details should match the one at the bottom of this page. If it does not, the update did not apply.

If something goes wrong

The full phrasebook is at what to say.

It answers from memory instead of looking. Ask “what media files do I have on this Mac?” rather than “what’s in my archive” — the word archive can be read as your past conversations.

It says the index is empty. The first scan runs in the background. Ask again in a minute; searching works on whatever has been indexed so far.

Do not drag a media folder into the chat window. That tries to read every file into the conversation and will fail on a large folder. Yellide finds your folders itself — there is nothing to attach.

Check the version at Settings → Extensions → Yellide. Extensions never update themselves — to upgrade you must uninstall, install the new file, and restart the app.

Settings, Extensions, Yellide: the extension panel with an Uninstall button, an Enabled
toggle and a Configure button. — Installed. **Uninstall** is top right — you will need it to upgrade, because a sideloaded extension keeps running the old code until you reinstall and restart.

You updated but nothing changed. A sideloaded extension keeps running the old code until you uninstall, reinstall, and restart the app. Check the version number on that screen.

Still stuck?

Ask Claude, in the same chat:

“Run Yellide diagnostics and show me the report.”

You will get something like this. Read it, then send it to whoever is helping you. It deliberately contains no filenames, no paths, no descriptions and no search terms — only counts and capabilities — so it is safe to paste anywhere.

YELLIDE DIAGNOSTIC REPORT
Contains no filenames, paths, captions or search terms. Safe to share.

version               0.9.11
platform              darwin arm64
can view pictures     yes — sips (built into macOS)
assets indexed        8,910
  cloud placeholders  7,862
content coverage      42% (3950 of 9446)

No obvious problems detected.

If something is wrong, the last line says so in plain words rather than leaving you to guess.

Other apps — ChatGPT, Codex, DeepSeek, Cursor

Yellide is a plain MCP server over stdio and nothing in it is specific to Claude, so any client that speaks MCP can use it. Point it at:

command: node
args:    /path/to/yellide/server/index.js

Watch for a stray space. Pasting a path into a settings field can pick up a leading space, and the app will report no error at all — the server simply never starts. It cost us an hour.

What you get depends on one thing: whether your AI can see pictures.

Works with any client	Filenames, folders, project names, dates, cameras, lenses, places, durations, and drives that are not plugged in. All thirteen tools.
Needs an AI that sees	Searching by what is in the picture. Yellide hands the actual images back and your AI writes down what it sees. A text-only model receives pictures it cannot look at, so nothing gets described.

In practice: ChatGPT and Codex use models that can see, so both halves should work — though a capable client sometimes prefers its own file search over Yellide, and you may have to ask for Yellide by name. DeepSeek’s chat models are text-only, so you get everything except the describing pass. That is a limit of the model, not a bug, and metadata search alone is still most of a working index.

The describing pass also needs macOS today, because it makes thumbnails with sips and video frames with qlmanage — both built in, which is why Yellide has no dependencies. And Node 22.5 or newer: Claude Desktop bundles its own, but other clients use yours.

Claude Desktop is the tested path. If you have the choice, start there and try the others once you know what working looks like.

Yellide is free and MIT-licensed. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account. If it ever disappears, export writes your whole index to plain JSON.
Current version 0.9.11 — extensions never update themselves, so check back here. What changed