Save All Media
Sift downloads videos from YouTube, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and a thousand other places, grabs subtitles (or creates transcript from audio), and does AI magic. Everything lands on your computer and stays there. Yes - it's {everything} Downloader, but it can do much more!
Free, forever. No account, nothing to sign up for. Nothing to sell you. Linux is coming. Mac if enough people ask.
What you get
All-In-One Local Media Manager
Download, transcribe, auto-detect slides, extract frames, write summaries, title & description ideas, blog or social posts, etc. All in one place, with local AI model, API key or your existing subscription.
You paste
A link, or a file
Paste it in, or drop a video or audio file onto the window.
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Video / Audio
Saved on your drive, in the quality you pick.
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Every Word Saved
Captions saved or audio transcribed and time stamped to the video.
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Analyzed
A summary, chapters, notes, whatever you want out of it.
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The Library
All of it searchable, with custom tags, filters, and extra AI magic.
No extra steps. All in one place. All transparent and fully controlled by you. No fees, no trial, no subscription.
Where from
Works Nearly Everywhere.
- YouTube
- X
- TikTok
- Vimeo
- Twitch
- SoundCloud
- Dailymotion
- and about a thousand more
If you can watch it, Sift can usually save it. Even things behind a login - you sign in using the built-in session grabber, and it stays signed in.
Slides
Turn a Talk Into Notes
Sift can process a talk or presentation and it finds slides (actual video frames with slides, charts, graphs or some other data). It generates a document with everything that was said, and each slide dropped at the moment it showed up in the video. You can grab frames manually or remove ones you don't like - time & content matched. No AI needed! Slide detection is built-in.
It's the difference between a 90-minute video and something you can read or use for a blog post or academic work.
You can save it as a document: the words with the slides in them, exactly as spoken. If you'd rather have it tidied into something more readable, with filler words removed, polished and ready - just click a button...
Every slide is placed in text at the moment it appears in the video. Ask for the tidied-up version and the writing gets smoothed out, with slides placed where they fit contextually.
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No Duplicates
A slide left up for a minute gives you one picture, not sixty. The near-identical ones are gone before you ever see them.
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Only What Matters
Sift reads each picture, and the ones with no data on them get dropped.
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Export Images
“Save slides…” saves the slides you kept as full-size pictures, in case you need them.
It's not perfect so don't expect miracles here, but it's free, runs locally, doesn't require an expensive machine and saves a lot of time when you need it.
The Words
Transcribe If Captions Are Missing
If the video already has captions, Sift just takes them.
If there are no captions at all, Sift will process the video and extract what's said. That part is AI, and it runs on your own computer. Nothing is sent anywhere for it. Either way you end up with a transcript, and every word, with the time it was said - which is what makes the video clickable and the slide document possible.
It isn't English-only. Other languages work, and you can tell Sift which ones you care about instead of leaving it to guess. For geeks: it's using "Faster Whisper" - a local voice-to-text model.
Transcription isn't instant - your computer is doing the "listening", so a one-hour talk with no captions can take a while. If you don't like the waiting - you can switch off transcripts and only run them when needed.
First time you run it, it needs to grab a 0.5GB file, after that transcription can run fully offline.
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Files You Have
Drag a video or an audio file onto the window and it skips straight to being written down. Your file isn't copied or moved - Sift reads it where you keep it, and removing it from the library leaves the original where it was.
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Create Subtitles
A transcript can be saved as a subtitle file. Drop it next to the video and it plays with the words on screen, in whatever you watch things in. Handy for sending a talk to somebody who'd rather read along than listen.
Summaries
AI Processing
Sift doesn't come with any language model or sell you access. You need to connect an account, bring your API key, or run an open source one through Ollama, LM Studio or whatever you like.
A long video costs more than a short one, and the smartest AI costs more than the cheapest. It's between you and your AI provider.
If you connect a paid account, your account details are locked away on your computer. Sift only ever uses them to talk to the one company you picked, and never sends them anywhere else.
Prompt Whatever You Want
A summary is only one of the things you can run. Sift comes with a handful of prompts — chapter marker, title ideas, a description, show notes, a blog post, a newsletter, the bits worth clipping. You can read them, change the wording, or write your own.
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Chapters That Point at Real Moments
Ask for chapters and the times come from what was actually said, not from a guess. Paste them into the YouTube description and they land where they should.
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Try It Out
Settings has a sandbox where you can test your prompts without making a mess of your library. Nothing you try there is saved.
Bulk Download
Paste Links / Add From a Channel
Sift works through them one at a time - saving, transcribing, summarising - and keeps going without you. Pause it, shuffle what's waiting, retry only the ones that went wrong. Close the app halfway through and it carries on where it stopped.
Video sites change how they work every few weeks, and that's what stops most downloaders working. Sift quietly keeps itself current so it carries on working.
Your library
All-In-One Media Library
Everything you've saved lands in one place. The whole point of that place is finding it again six months later.
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Search Everything
Not just titles. Type a phrase you half-remember hearing and the video comes back, along with the line it came from.
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Show / Hide
Click multiple labels and you'll only see the videos that have them. Right-click a label instead and everything with it disappears - handy when you want everything except your selection.
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Filter By Creator
Or by where it came from. The filters sit next to the search box and apply to everything, not just the page you're looking at.
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Click a Line, Jump to That Moment
The words scroll along with the video while it plays, and any line you click takes you straight there.
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Two Ways To Look At It
Thumbnails when you want to see what things are, or a sortable list when you want to see who made it, how long it is and when you saved it, all lined up in columns.
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Watch It Somewhere Else
Make a playlist out of whatever you're currently looking at and open it in the media player or TV app you already use.
Channels
Track a Channel
Follow a channel and Sift keeps count of what's new since you last looked. Browse its videos, shorts and live streams, tick the ones you want, and send them all off at once. And if you sign in to YouTube inside Sift, it can pull in the channels you already subscribe to, so you don't type them in one at a time.
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Virality Flag
A video that did much better than that channel's usual gets a small badge showing how much better. It's a rough signal, not a measurement — treat it as “worth a look”.
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Signing in
Members-only and age-checked videos need you to be logged in. Sift opens a browser window of its own, you sign in the normal way, and that stays on your computer so Sift can use your logged-in session to access gated media.
Your Files
Pick A Destination Folder
Videos, transcripts and summaries are saved into a Sift folder inside your Downloads, and you can move that anywhere you like. They're ordinary files - the video plays in whatever you normally use, and the transcript and the summary open in Notepad, Word, or anything else, whether Sift is running or not. Every video has a list of the files Sift created for it.
What never leaves your computer
- Your videos. The ones you saved and the ones you had.
- Every transcript, and every summary.
- Your AI account details, locked away where only Sift can read them.
- Anything you signed into. That goes to the site you signed into and nowhere else.
- Everything you searched, labelled or filtered. Every video you looked at and didn't save.
One exception, and it's the obvious one: when you ask for a summary, the words get sent to whichever AI service you picked. Pick the free one that runs on your own computer and even that stays local.
What Sift connects to
- The site you're saving the video from.
- A check for a new version when it starts, plus the quiet background fixes that keep Sift working with video sites.
- Thumbnails, fetched once and then kept.
- The AI account you chose, if you chose one.
- The one-off download that lets Sift transcribe a video, the first time you need it.
None of it is reported back to me - there's no account and no analytics here. The site you're saving from sees the request, the way it would in a browser, and the AI service you picked sees the words you deliberately send it.
Price
It's Free. Forever.
No subscription, no account, no trial, no upsell. The app collects nothing about you - no analytics, no tracking, no crash reports. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to hand over. I'm not building a business, just having fun building for myself and sharing it.
Contingency
One person, no money coming in - so what happens in eighteen months? Fair question. Two things make it survivable. Sift keeps up with the video sites on its own, so saving videos keeps working whether or not I put out another release. And everything Sift makes is an ordinary file in a folder you chose - so if I stopped tomorrow, you'd lose new features and nothing else. The code is public and anyone can carry it on.
Who made it
Who & Why?
Questions
Questions people actually ask.
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no trial, no paid version waiting behind it. The only thing you might pay for is an AI account for the summaries, and that money goes to them, not to me — and there's a free option that runs on your own computer instead.
How long does it take?
Saving a video takes about as long as your connection needs. If the video already has captions, the words are there in seconds. If it doesn't, your computer has to listen to the whole thing — ten or fifteen minutes for an hour of talking on a fast desktop, and I'd expect roughly half an hour to forty-five minutes on a laptop, though I haven't timed one. You can line up a batch and go and do something else.
Where do my files go?
Into a Sift folder inside your Downloads, and you can move that anywhere. The video, the transcript and the summary are ordinary files that open in whatever you already use. The slide pictures are the exception — they live in Sift's own folder rather than sitting next to the video, and there's a button on every video that opens that folder.
Do I have to give you anything?
No. There's no account and no sign-up, and nothing in the app reports anything about you back to me. It checks my releases page for a new version, and that's the whole of it. Your videos, your transcripts and your sign-ins stay on your computer. The one thing that ever leaves is the text of a video you deliberately send off for a summary, and that goes to whichever AI service you picked. This website has no form on it at all.
Can I do a whole channel at once?
Yes. Follow a channel and you can browse everything on it, tick the ones you want, and send the lot off in one go. A playlist link on its own only saves the one video you pasted.
Mac? Linux?
Linux is coming. Mac only if enough people want one — it's real work and there's no point doing it for nobody. If you want one, say so on the project page — it's a free sign-up and it takes a minute — or just email me. That's how I'll count, and it's the only counting there is.
What happens when a site changes and breaks it?
YouTube and the rest change how they work every few weeks, and that's what makes most download tools quietly stop working. Sift fixes itself for those changes on its own, without waiting for a whole new version of the app, and you don't have to install anything for it. If you'd rather approve each fix yourself, there's a setting.
Is it legal to save this stuff?
Sift runs on your computer and does what you tell it to. It doesn't decide what's alright to save — that's on you, and this isn't legal advice. What's allowed varies by site and by what you plan to do with the result.
Get Sift
Download for Windows — freeUpdated 14 October 2026 — always the latest one. First time you run it, Windows will warn you it doesn't recognise the publisher. That's because I haven't paid to have it signed. Click “More info”, then “Run anyway”.
- Linux — coming soon.
- Mac — not built yet. If enough people want it, I'll build it.
Want it on a Mac?
There's no Mac version yet. Leave your name and I'll email you once — the day it exists. If hardly anyone does, that tells me it isn't worth building, which is just as useful to know.
One email, when the Mac version ships. Nothing else, ever. The form itself is handled by Tally — it's the only thing on this page that talks to anybody else, and only once you open it.
Free, forever. No account, and nothing to sign up for to use it — the Mac list above is the only thing on this page that asks you for anything, and it's entirely optional.