Show HN: Fallinorg - Offline Mac app that organizes files by meaning

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 :-/

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? :)

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

This becomes interesting once you support epub, cbz, cbr.

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.

…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.

> 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/...?

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.

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...

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!