The Archive: finding every moment with Lolo, Paprika and Oskar

Lolo shared sixteen years of my life. When he left, I wanted every moment of him I still had, and those moments were scattered across my current computer, two external drives and an older PC, mixed with everything else.

The Archive looks through all of it for me. It pulls key frames from every video, spots the cats and dogs with a small vision model, then learns from my own choices to tell Lolo apart from Paprika, Oskar and every other animal.

On my current computer alone, it went through 1,988 videos and found 319 with an animal, 155 of them with Lolo. Two external drives and another PC are still waiting, so the real collection is far bigger, and that is exactly the job this tool is here for. On the photos I had already sorted, it recognises the right companion almost nine times out of ten. Everything runs and stays on my own machine.

Made for a gentle kind of sorting:

• Videos and photos in two separate collections.
• One click marks everything as Lolo, then I correct the exceptions, with an undo button.
• Automatic names stay clearly marked until I confirm them, and the hard cases get their own tab.
• Any keyword comes next: the same engine will search my photos for whatever I ask.

Built with Python, FFmpeg, YOLO and Claude Code.

Some archives are worth far more than their size in gigabytes.

Built for myself, for Lolo, Paprika and Oskar.