Can Spotlight search inside my videos? HyperArc vs Spotlight

01Who should use which

• Use Spotlight when you know the file name, a word in the document, or you just want to open an app. Nothing beats it for that, and it costs nothing.
• Use HyperArc when you remember what something looked or sounded like but not where it is: the clip where someone holds up a red mug, the part of a call where pricing came up, the slide with the revenue chart in a 90-page deck.
• Use both if you keep a lot of video, audio or scanned material. They barely overlap: Spotlight for the whole Mac, HyperArc for the content of a few folders you care about.

02Side by side

03What Spotlight actually searches

Spotlight keeps an index of file names, file metadata and the text inside documents it knows how to read. For a PDF with a real text layer, that means the full text. For a video or audio file, it means the name plus metadata like duration and dimensions. It never listens to the audio or looks at the frames, so a search for “where we talked about pricing” only works if those words happen to be in the file name.

Images are a grey area. Recent versions of macOS can pull text out of pictures with Live Text and feed it to Spotlight, but people who have tested it report that it's hit and miss. Scanned PDFs generally need OCR from another app before Spotlight can see their words.

04What HyperArc does differently

1. You add the folders you care about. Nothing else is touched.
2. Video and audio get split into time segments, 2 minutes by default (you can pick 30, 60 or 90 seconds instead). PDFs are split into pages. Images and text files are taken whole.
3. Each chunk is sent to Google's Gemini embedding API with your own API key. Gemini returns an embedding, which is a list of numbers that captures what the chunk is about.
4. Those embeddings go into a local SQLite database on your Mac. When you search, your query is embedded the same way and compared against that local index.
5. You get a list of files with the matching time range or page, and clicking one takes you straight there.

The upshot is that you can search by meaning. “Dog running on a trail” can find a clip named IMG_4471.MOV. Spotlight can't, because nothing in the name or metadata says dog.

05Where Spotlight is better

• It's free and already there. No setup, no key, no license.
• It's instant and fully offline. HyperArc needs a connection to index and to embed new queries.
• It covers everything. Apps, mail, messages, settings, every file on the disk. HyperArc only knows the folders you gave it.
• Nothing leaves your Mac. With HyperArc, chunks of your files go to Google's Gemini API under your key. If that is a dealbreaker for certain folders, leave those folders out.
• Exact words. If you remember the exact phrase in a document, Spotlight's text search is the more direct tool.

06Where HyperArc is better

• Finding a moment inside a long video or recording.
• Finding photos by describing them, in folders outside Photos.
• Finding the right page in a big PDF when you remember the idea, not the wording.
• One search box across video, audio, images and PDFs in the same folders.

If most of your media is in the Photos app, check what Photos search can already do before paying for anything. I walk through that in how to search inside your videos on a Mac. For recordings, see how to find something said in a voice memo or meeting recording.

FAQQuestions people ask

MORERelated pages

• HyperArc vs DEVONthink. A document manager with transcription versus a media search app.
• Mac apps that search inside videos, compared. Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Jumper, Photos and HyperArc.
• How to search inside your videos on a Mac. Free options first, then the paid ones.
• How to find something said in a recording on a Mac. Voice memos, podcasts and meeting recordings.
• HyperArc home page. Natural-language search for your videos, audio, photos and PDFs on Mac.