Privacy

You are about to point this at years of work, some of it a client’s. Here is exactly what happens to it, in plain terms, with nothing left out.

What leaves your computer

Yellide makes no network calls at all. There is no server to talk to, no account, no licence check and no update ping. You can confirm this yourself: the whole thing is about 2,200 lines of JavaScript and it imports no networking library.

The one time anything leaves your machine is when you ask Claude to look at your pictures so it can describe them. Those images go to your own AI provider, through your own subscription, in your own conversation — the same path as any image you paste into a chat yourself. Yellide is not in the middle of it and never sees it.

If you never ask for descriptions, nothing ever leaves.

What we collect

Nothing. There are no analytics on this website either — no counter, no pixel, no cookie. A download page that phones home would contradict the entire product.

What gets written to your drives

Two things, and only two.

The index itself

A single SQLite file in the normal place for application data on your system:

macOS    ~/Library/Application Support/yellide/catalog.db
Windows  %APPDATA%\yellide\catalog.db
Linux    ~/.local/share/yellide/catalog.db

Delete that file and Yellide has forgotten everything. Nothing else is left behind.

A marker on each drive you index

When Yellide indexes an external drive it writes one small file to it:

<drive>/.yellide/volume-id

It contains a single random identifier and nothing else — no filenames, no descriptions, no information about you. It exists so that Yellide still recognises the drive after you rename it, which is how it can tell you “that clip is on KERALA_2023, and that drive is not plugged in.”

What Yellide never does to your files

• It never modifies, moves, renames or deletes any photo, video or audio file.
• It never downloads your cloud files. iCloud and Dropbox placeholders are detected and stepped over, not pulled down.
• It reads metadata headers, plus the first and last megabyte of each file to identify it.

Private documents

Anything you mark private is recorded by type only — identity document, medical report — never by its contents, and never with a description. Mark one copy and every identical copy is marked, wherever else it sits on your drives. Exports reduce private items to a bare label.

Why you can check all of this

The source is MIT-licensed and public. That is the only real proof any of the above is true, which is why it is the licence.

github.com/urbanmorph/yellide