Majestical · media catalog for macOS

Verified ingest.
Offline search.
Local AI.

Majestical keeps your footage above water, checksumming every byte on the way in. Thumbnails and metadata stay in the catalog after the drive goes back on the shelf. Local AI handles the tagging, transcription, and scene detection, all of it without uploading your footage to the cloud.

Download for macOS View source on GitHub

Open source, Apache-2.0. In active development.

The problem

Your footage is on eleven drives in a drawer.

Every shoot ends the same way: cards offloaded to whichever drive had room, under a folder name you meant to fix later. The shelf grows until only you can navigate it. The tools that offload carefully were never built to search. The ones built for search want the library on their hardware, rented back to you by the seat.

Majestical does the opposite. The drives stay yours and the catalog stays on your computer, where losing the app never costs you the work.

What it does

Fully featured, professional quality.

Proven intact

Ingest hashes every byte with xxHash, once on the source read and again on the destination read-back. It then writes spec-compliant ASC MHL manifests that ride on the drive with the media. Netflix recommends the same format for camera originals.

Searchable on the shelf

The catalog keeps thumbnails and checksums for every volume it has ever seen. The metadata stays too, long after the drive is unplugged. Search a drive sitting in a drawer or in a pelican case two states away, and the result tells you which disk to fetch.

Semantic search, at home

Image and keyframe embeddings run on your Mac’s neural engine. Type what you remember, something like “red boat at golden hour,” and the clips come back with timestamps. Captions and tag suggestions come from Ollama, LM Studio, or OpenRouter. Each catalog draws its own privacy line, so one project can stay fully local.

Team sync, no server

The catalog is an append-only event log that merges cleanly in any order. Sync it through a NAS folder, through Dropbox, or on the shuttle drive itself. Plug in at the far end and both catalogs converge, without anyone running a service.

Organization

Opinionated folders. Freeform tags.

Ingest files everything into a PARA layout (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives), so the disk stays legible with or without the app. Everything else is folksonomy. Tag in your own words, and the app suggests the vocabulary your team already uses.

Existing drives are cataloged exactly as they are, with nothing moved until you ask. 

Projects/
  2026-reef-survey/
    2026-07-12/card-A001/…
Areas/
  gear-inventory/
Resources/
  stock-audio/
Archives/
  2025-keys-documentary/

For people and agents

The terminal reaches everything the app does.

The GUI, the maj CLI, and a built-in MCP server share one engine. Ask your agent to find the selects or tag an ingest, and it goes through the same core service the GUI uses. Destructive steps stay gated behind a confirmation. 

$ maj search "tag:topic/drone" --json
{"count":3,"results":[{"asset":"xxh3:9f2a…","name":"drone_flyover_01.mov","para":null,"score":0.0,"tags":["topic/drone"],"volumes":[{"id":"uuid:2FBE…","label":"reef-cards","online":false}]},…]}
$ maj volumes list
ID          LABEL       LAST SEEN             ONLINE   ASSETS
uuid:2FBE…  reef-cards  2026-07-12T18:40:11Z  offline  4182

End of the road

Get Majestical.

Majestical is free and open source under Apache-2.0. Written in Rust, it runs natively on Apple silicon. Updates arrive through GitHub releases.

Download for macOS All releases