Two minutes. You will not need a terminal, and you will never type a file path.
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.
“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:
Installing will grant this extension access to everything on your computer. Any developer information shown has not been verified by Anthropic. Ensure you trust the source of this extension before installation.
“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”
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.
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.
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 0.9.5 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.
Yellide is a standard MCP server, so anything that speaks MCP over stdio can use it — Codex, Cursor, LM Studio, Cline, Goose. Point them 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.
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.
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