Even without changing one byte of the actual binary they could get pretty far by just evicting all the test files for those packages they're including. And, related to that, it seems that dist-info/RECORD ends up at 1,050,544 because the onnx folks decided it was important that they cryptographically sign all those test data files they're choosing to ship :-/
Thanks for pointing this out mdaniel & woadwarrior01 — reducing the footprint is definitely on my radar and something I’m actively working on. I actually started with CoreML but switched to ONNX after running into some issues.
That said, it’s kind of amazing that we can run models of ~90 MB this efficiently on our devices today — the performance has been really encouraging. Appreciate the feedback!
Hi HN,
Fallinorg is a local macOS app that organizes files by their meaning, not just their name or type.
Problem: My Downloads and Desktop folders kept filling up with cryptically named, duplicate, or unrelated files. Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Solution: It uses Sentence Transformers (SBERT) to understand the content and context of files, then automatically groups them. It runs fully offline, so you can safely classify sensitive files (finance, medical, personal, etc.). On Apple Silicon, it parses, tokenizes, and categorizes a file in about ~1.2 seconds.
Current version: Supports .txt and .pdf files in English; I’m working on adding more formats and languages.
Looking for feedback on: Classification accuracy, speed, pricing ideas, and potential bulk operations or integrations.
I first launched a few weeks ago and have been rapidly adding features based on early feedback. Happy to answer questions and share implementation details.
Given that this is a Mac app, have you considered taking advantage of the considerable amount of metadata for files (sometimes including full text content) made available by QuickLook? It could extend functionality for many file formats without requiring the app to be able to parse them.
> Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
I feel like we’re entering an age where there is going to be increasingly more data in every day lives. (Just think about every chat in your ChatGPT account)
I guess one solution is to make everything searchable and try to organize everything. Or start treating things as ephemeral.
There’s probably no right answer. E.g. the difference between people who like having 50+ tabs open in Chrome, and needing features to organize and search tabs, versus people who treat tabs as ephemeral and short lived. I’m in the latter camp, but maybe just a matter of personal preference.
Has anyone coined the term “digital hoarding” yet? :)
It would be nice to have the ability to define custom categories.
One option would be to let users drop custom folder in settings. These folders could have representative files in them (maybe with a custom Finder tag to identify them), then you can cluster documents by similarity like you are already doing.
Nice application! I am looking forward to see it evolve.
I'd recommend adding a video or gif that demonstrates how it works for organizing files. I kinda get it but would prefer to see it in action before downloading
Presale pricing is weird, or at least unclear. I am totally fine with pricing strategies where you buy a perpetual license for the current major version only but this seems like less than that. It appears that for $10 we can have something available for free that may be updated some unknown amount, but probably without any significant new behavior, and then we’ll get a discount that could very well be less than the $10 we put in.
You could improve the situation by presenting some kind of roadmap and indicating the limit of presale or stating clearly the amount, or a minimum amount, of discount on V1 offered to presale purchasers.
I haven’t yet tried the thing but it looks interesting. It also looks reminiscent of quickly implemented Whisper or GPT-3 front ends released a couple years ago. I’d like to better understand the value you’re providing over Apple Intelligence provided APIs.
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I’ll definitely add a roadmap and make the presale terms clearer (e.g. version limits and minimum discounts). That’s very fair.
Regarding Apple Intelligence: you’re right, Apple is integrating more AI features at the OS level, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still quite limited. For example, semantic search are not really handled in a way that solves the problem. Fallinorg is built to work fully offline, across any file type, and with deeper control/flexibility than what Apple currently exposes through their APIs.
Put simply: if Apple ever does this well, great — but right now, I think there’s still a lot of room for a tool that is private, offline, and purpose-built for file management.
No, I’m not. They asked for feedback and specifically called out their pricing strategy. It’s a critical part of launching a product, it merits thought. You just don’t know enough to recognize its importance.
I could really really use something that would OCR and classify all the screenshots I take of stuff to remember. Have an enormous folder of the damn things.
> I could really really use something that would OCR and classify all the screenshots I take of stuff to remember.
IMHO, a Spotlight Importer[0] would be the way to go. A quick search found the MacOS Vision OCR[1] project, which might be able to be incorporated as an importer.
In any event, whatever OCR approach you prefer, leveraging Spotlight would obviate the need for a service to index and then find screenshots.
> Email us at fallinorg@proton.me with ith your refund request and reason. We’ll be happy to assist you.
Not to be a jerk, but if copy-editing for a pre-sale AI feature that operates on my local files includes such an oversight, it doesn’t inspire confidence. I know copy-editing and coding are different domains, but I’m still put off by it.
bobnarizes - I have been toying with an idea like this for sometime. I have already bought yours! I think there is a great market for this! Best of luck! Keep plugging away!
Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.
Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Demo is not that convincing. Also, I need multilanguage support, and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this. (Which again, needs beforehand knowledge of which language the document might be in?)
But, cheap, and pay once and offline. Will keep an eye on it.
> Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.
> Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Folder names and spaces: full customization is coming — you’ll be able to name and organize them however you like.
> Demo is not that convincing.
Demo: what felt missing or unconvincing? Any feedback helps improve it.
> Also, I need multilanguage support
Multi-language: on the roadmap — which languages matter most to you?
> and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this.
currently not automatic for scanned PDFs. I’m also validating whether sorting images, videos, and audio based on their content/meaning would provide real value. What do you think?
Thank you so much for testing it and giving all this feedback!
If there were a CLI version, what would your ideal workflow look like? For example, would you want it to run as a one-off command on a folder, or as something you can integrate into cron/jobs/pipelines/...?
This is the kind of things Apple should focus on. Automatic file organization is right up Apple's alley, if they were ever to wake up the Finder's dev team from the 20-year hibernation.
I would guess that using an efficient embedding model to organize files is probably forthcoming in the next year or two.
Rather than moving similar files into folders, I can see the OS suggesting related files based on similarity to another file, or permitting search by concept rather than keyword.
I have has a couple of macs that randomly do not show "Recent" files in the recent folder so I take that as one signal among many that Apple is not paying a lot of attention to the experience in desktop environments beyond some minimal maintenance effort
I wanted to validate whether there’s real market interest and if people would actually be willing to pay for a tool like this, since it solves a real problem.
User can give example documents... have sbert test against dewey decimal classifications, or library of congress, also categories for home users (bills, manuals, bank documents, etc) and standard business categories (HR, production and so on). User verifies categories.
Onboarding would ask user about their work, research, hobby interests. LLM could generate word lists asking user if it matches their understanding. And so on.
Up to you, but they had GitHub issues turned on for the distribution repo so you can file an issue there, which allows others to see when it's fixed and whether it affects them, too
Thanks for reporting this John2022! As mdaniel mention, please file an issue on GitHub so it’s tracked and others can see updates or add details. That way I can fix it faster.
It seems to be less of a "file organizer" than it is a "document organizer" since it only supports plain text and PDF files.
Personally, I don't think I have that many PDF and text files that organizing them manually would be a pain. The organization logic also is a miss for me, since I don't really organize my documents in buckets like "Legal & Contracts", but rather I have folders like "Car" (for my car's service records, bill of sale, owner's manual, etc.) and "Mortgage" (mortgage quotes, contracts, etc) that's housed under "Apartment".
Doesn't help that most of these documents are not in English.
You’re right — at the moment it’s limited to text and PDFs, but this is just the starting point. Support for more file types, more languages, and full customization (so you can define your own categories, folder names, and destinations) will be rolled out next.
I’d love to learn from your use case: what are the top 5 file types you find yourself storing most often on your Mac?
I think you are missing an opportunity here to make this a note taking only tool. People are talking about searching word documents (Binary Files) but its going to be a pain in the ass to support every file type and file types that don't have good portability.
IMHO, the future is Knowledge Management and for that you really need text like like formats like markdown.
You should look into porting your app into a plug-in like feature for a knowledge management tool like Obsidian. That is the kind of audience that is going to latch on to this idea quicker than anyone else.
Im thinking you will get clearer feedback from that audience. Of course I am biased since I am an Obsidian user. I dont use word processing apps at all. All my writing is done in Markdown applications and final documents are either ported to PDF or HTML.
I had a similar idea about organizing files but I dont have programming skills so Im glad you are working on something like this. My idea, which I do not mind that you steal (Probably someone already thought about this) is figuring out a way to isolate information into categories based on a current selected feeling of the day, or a project you plan on working on based on some type of schedule. It would help with isolating personal project from work project data that can cause distractions.
Im not a mac user but I watched the video and I can see what its doing. It's pretty impressive. It would be cool if we (Obsidian) users had something like this to link ideas together. As it stands right now, I think you have to do all of the linking manually. A lot of people in the Obsidian community use the Zettelkasten Method of organizing information and the linking feature that is part of Obsidian is naturally good at that.
ripgrep-all and recoll come to mind as projects that might be helpful to look at for supporting additional file types.
Fallinorg is great and something I’ve also thought about quite a bit. Local LLMs probably could enable lots of organizational workflows. I can’t wait to try what you have. Thanks for sharing and working on this problem.
The Python 3.13 virtualenv you're bundling with the app is 357MB, while the ONNX model is only 90.4MB.
onnxruntime has Swift bindings[1], consider using that. Or better yet use CoreML. You'll also be able to support x86 Macs with either of those.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime-swift-package-manag...
Even without changing one byte of the actual binary they could get pretty far by just evicting all the test files for those packages they're including. And, related to that, it seems that dist-info/RECORD ends up at 1,050,544 because the onnx folks decided it was important that they cryptographically sign all those test data files they're choosing to ship :-/
Thanks for pointing this out mdaniel & woadwarrior01 — reducing the footprint is definitely on my radar and something I’m actively working on. I actually started with CoreML but switched to ONNX after running into some issues.
That said, it’s kind of amazing that we can run models of ~90 MB this efficiently on our devices today — the performance has been really encouraging. Appreciate the feedback!
Hi HN, Fallinorg is a local macOS app that organizes files by their meaning, not just their name or type.
Problem: My Downloads and Desktop folders kept filling up with cryptically named, duplicate, or unrelated files. Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Solution: It uses Sentence Transformers (SBERT) to understand the content and context of files, then automatically groups them. It runs fully offline, so you can safely classify sensitive files (finance, medical, personal, etc.). On Apple Silicon, it parses, tokenizes, and categorizes a file in about ~1.2 seconds.
You can download and test it now for free: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/tag/1.0.0-b...
Current version: Supports .txt and .pdf files in English; I’m working on adding more formats and languages.
Looking for feedback on: Classification accuracy, speed, pricing ideas, and potential bulk operations or integrations.
I first launched a few weeks ago and have been rapidly adding features based on early feedback. Happy to answer questions and share implementation details.
Given that this is a Mac app, have you considered taking advantage of the considerable amount of metadata for files (sometimes including full text content) made available by QuickLook? It could extend functionality for many file formats without requiring the app to be able to parse them.
That's brilliant thank you I will investigate on this! I haven't thought about it.
> Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
I feel like we’re entering an age where there is going to be increasingly more data in every day lives. (Just think about every chat in your ChatGPT account)
I guess one solution is to make everything searchable and try to organize everything. Or start treating things as ephemeral.
There’s probably no right answer. E.g. the difference between people who like having 50+ tabs open in Chrome, and needing features to organize and search tabs, versus people who treat tabs as ephemeral and short lived. I’m in the latter camp, but maybe just a matter of personal preference.
Has anyone coined the term “digital hoarding” yet? :)
> Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
Hazel[0] works well for this, but automatic download folder cleanup feels a lot like it should be a stock Finder feature.
[0]: https://www.noodlesoft.com
Moving files from Downloads to a specified archive folder every x days is also a “side“ feature of https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge
It would be nice to have the ability to define custom categories.
One option would be to let users drop custom folder in settings. These folders could have representative files in them (maybe with a custom Finder tag to identify them), then you can cluster documents by similarity like you are already doing.
Nice application! I am looking forward to see it evolve.
I'd recommend adding a video or gif that demonstrates how it works for organizing files. I kinda get it but would prefer to see it in action before downloading
The video will be displayed at the top of the homepage. Since I’m hosting it on GitHub Pages, the server might occasionally be overloaded.
You can also access the video directly here: https://fallinorg.com/assets/demo.mp4
This becomes interesting once you support epub, cbz, cbr.
Presale pricing is weird, or at least unclear. I am totally fine with pricing strategies where you buy a perpetual license for the current major version only but this seems like less than that. It appears that for $10 we can have something available for free that may be updated some unknown amount, but probably without any significant new behavior, and then we’ll get a discount that could very well be less than the $10 we put in.
You could improve the situation by presenting some kind of roadmap and indicating the limit of presale or stating clearly the amount, or a minimum amount, of discount on V1 offered to presale purchasers.
I haven’t yet tried the thing but it looks interesting. It also looks reminiscent of quickly implemented Whisper or GPT-3 front ends released a couple years ago. I’d like to better understand the value you’re providing over Apple Intelligence provided APIs.
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I’ll definitely add a roadmap and make the presale terms clearer (e.g. version limits and minimum discounts). That’s very fair.
Regarding Apple Intelligence: you’re right, Apple is integrating more AI features at the OS level, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still quite limited. For example, semantic search are not really handled in a way that solves the problem. Fallinorg is built to work fully offline, across any file type, and with deeper control/flexibility than what Apple currently exposes through their APIs.
Put simply: if Apple ever does this well, great — but right now, I think there’s still a lot of room for a tool that is private, offline, and purpose-built for file management.
Dude.
It’s $10. You’ve got to be joking.
No, I’m not. They asked for feedback and specifically called out their pricing strategy. It’s a critical part of launching a product, it merits thought. You just don’t know enough to recognize its importance.
I could really really use something that would OCR and classify all the screenshots I take of stuff to remember. Have an enormous folder of the damn things.
> I could really really use something that would OCR and classify all the screenshots I take of stuff to remember.
IMHO, a Spotlight Importer[0] would be the way to go. A quick search found the MacOS Vision OCR[1] project, which might be able to be incorporated as an importer.
In any event, whatever OCR approach you prefer, leveraging Spotlight would obviate the need for a service to index and then find screenshots.
0 - https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ca...
1 - https://github.com/bytefer/macos-vision-ocr
I think that it’s probably doable in DEVONthink. There are flows to automatically OCR and to organize files into folders based on content.
…Or scans that come off a page scanner. For years, I’ve done it deterministically by looking for key data in the OCR; but the process is fragile.
Typo / editing issue:
> Email us at fallinorg@proton.me with ith your refund request and reason. We’ll be happy to assist you.
Not to be a jerk, but if copy-editing for a pre-sale AI feature that operates on my local files includes such an oversight, it doesn’t inspire confidence. I know copy-editing and coding are different domains, but I’m still put off by it.
Good catch — I’ve fixed the typo and I’m sorry for the oversight. Details matter, especially when trust is involved. Thanks for pointing it out!
bobnarizes - I have been toying with an idea like this for sometime. I have already bought yours! I think there is a great market for this! Best of luck! Keep plugging away!
Thank you very much berkesquires! I really appreciate!
Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.
Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Demo is not that convincing. Also, I need multilanguage support, and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this. (Which again, needs beforehand knowledge of which language the document might be in?)
But, cheap, and pay once and offline. Will keep an eye on it.
> Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.
> Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Folder names and spaces: full customization is coming — you’ll be able to name and organize them however you like.
> Demo is not that convincing.
Demo: what felt missing or unconvincing? Any feedback helps improve it.
> Also, I need multilanguage support
Multi-language: on the roadmap — which languages matter most to you?
> and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this.
currently not automatic for scanned PDFs. I’m also validating whether sorting images, videos, and audio based on their content/meaning would provide real value. What do you think?
Thank you so much for testing it and giving all this feedback!
Have you considered offering a Command-Line version as well? I would use something like this if it wasn't just an app and worked on Linux.
Would be neat if it studied your existing organizational patterns and tried to fit any changes to match it.
If there were a CLI version, what would your ideal workflow look like? For example, would you want it to run as a one-off command on a folder, or as something you can integrate into cron/jobs/pipelines/...?
This is the kind of things Apple should focus on. Automatic file organization is right up Apple's alley, if they were ever to wake up the Finder's dev team from the 20-year hibernation.
I would guess that using an efficient embedding model to organize files is probably forthcoming in the next year or two.
Rather than moving similar files into folders, I can see the OS suggesting related files based on similarity to another file, or permitting search by concept rather than keyword.
I have has a couple of macs that randomly do not show "Recent" files in the recent folder so I take that as one signal among many that Apple is not paying a lot of attention to the experience in desktop environments beyond some minimal maintenance effort
"Download Pre-Sale" is a bit sketchy. Why not just make a trial?
I wanted to validate whether there’s real market interest and if people would actually be willing to pay for a tool like this, since it solves a real problem.
That said, I’d love if you give it a try, here's the download link: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/tag/1.0.0-b...
There's definitely a real market. I'd recommend adding office documents next. And then user defined categories.
Thanks oidar, out of the big three (word, excel, PowerPoint) do you use another ms office documents?
Can you please elaborate more on how would you set up a user define category?
User can give example documents... have sbert test against dewey decimal classifications, or library of congress, also categories for home users (bills, manuals, bank documents, etc) and standard business categories (HR, production and so on). User verifies categories.
Onboarding would ask user about their work, research, hobby interests. LLM could generate word lists asking user if it matches their understanding. And so on.
Also open document format (CSV, TSV too).
It (at least the version on github) crashes on my macbook m1 pro
Up to you, but they had GitHub issues turned on for the distribution repo so you can file an issue there, which allows others to see when it's fixed and whether it affects them, too
Thanks for reporting this John2022! As mdaniel mention, please file an issue on GitHub so it’s tracked and others can see updates or add details. That way I can fix it faster.
It seems to be less of a "file organizer" than it is a "document organizer" since it only supports plain text and PDF files.
Personally, I don't think I have that many PDF and text files that organizing them manually would be a pain. The organization logic also is a miss for me, since I don't really organize my documents in buckets like "Legal & Contracts", but rather I have folders like "Car" (for my car's service records, bill of sale, owner's manual, etc.) and "Mortgage" (mortgage quotes, contracts, etc) that's housed under "Apartment".
Doesn't help that most of these documents are not in English.
You’re right — at the moment it’s limited to text and PDFs, but this is just the starting point. Support for more file types, more languages, and full customization (so you can define your own categories, folder names, and destinations) will be rolled out next.
I’d love to learn from your use case: what are the top 5 file types you find yourself storing most often on your Mac?
Thanks for the feedback!
I think you are missing an opportunity here to make this a note taking only tool. People are talking about searching word documents (Binary Files) but its going to be a pain in the ass to support every file type and file types that don't have good portability.
IMHO, the future is Knowledge Management and for that you really need text like like formats like markdown.
You should look into porting your app into a plug-in like feature for a knowledge management tool like Obsidian. That is the kind of audience that is going to latch on to this idea quicker than anyone else.
Im thinking you will get clearer feedback from that audience. Of course I am biased since I am an Obsidian user. I dont use word processing apps at all. All my writing is done in Markdown applications and final documents are either ported to PDF or HTML.
I had a similar idea about organizing files but I dont have programming skills so Im glad you are working on something like this. My idea, which I do not mind that you steal (Probably someone already thought about this) is figuring out a way to isolate information into categories based on a current selected feeling of the day, or a project you plan on working on based on some type of schedule. It would help with isolating personal project from work project data that can cause distractions.
Im not a mac user but I watched the video and I can see what its doing. It's pretty impressive. It would be cool if we (Obsidian) users had something like this to link ideas together. As it stands right now, I think you have to do all of the linking manually. A lot of people in the Obsidian community use the Zettelkasten Method of organizing information and the linking feature that is part of Obsidian is naturally good at that.
ripgrep-all and recoll come to mind as projects that might be helpful to look at for supporting additional file types.
Fallinorg is great and something I’ve also thought about quite a bit. Local LLMs probably could enable lots of organizational workflows. I can’t wait to try what you have. Thanks for sharing and working on this problem.