mshelf

mshelf is a desktop media library for video editors. It sits beside Premiere or Resolve and finds the B-roll shot, music bed, logo sting or room tone you know you have somewhere, from a plain description like "drone over coastline at dusk".

The problem#

Editors collect years of footage, stills, audio, documents and fonts across internal disks, external drives and network shares. Filenames and folders stop helping long before the library stops growing, so good material goes unused.

What it does#

• Search by description. Hybrid keyword and semantic search across whole files, moments inside long clips, and words spoken in them.
• Indexes in place. Watched folders and drives are indexed where they live; nothing is copied or moved, and unplugged drives simply show as offline.
• AI on your terms. Bring your own Claude, OpenAI or Mistral key. Nothing is analyzed or sent until you press Run and see the estimate, and your edits to descriptions are kept.
• Script pulls. Paste a script and get clips matched to each sentence, exported as folders, a Premiere/Resolve XML with in and out points, and a shot list.
• People. Face detection and grouping run only on your computer and never leave it.
• Generated media. Optional voiceovers, music and moving stills through the ElevenLabs API, saved into the library.
• Scriptable. Every action is also a local API call and an MCP tool, so AI apps such as Claude can search and file media.

How it's built#

A Rust core holds the library, SQLite index and every command. The Tauri 2 desktop shell, a local HTTP API and an MCP bridge all call the same commands, with a SvelteKit and Svelte 5 interface on top. It ships for macOS, with Windows builds prepared.