FileFolio

FileFolio helps privacy-conscious professionals keep large PDF collections searchable and organized using local AI. No cloud, no telemetry, all on your machine.

Status: Actively maintained, used on my own 1,000+ PDF collection. Expect breaking changes before v1.0, but I'm responsive to issues and feedback.

Why FileFolio?

• You have hundreds of PDF bills, reports, or research papers scattered in folders.
• You care about privacy and do not want to upload them to cloud AI services.
• You still want smart search, auto-tagging, and reasonable file names.

FileFolio watches a folder, uses a local LLM via Ollama to analyze each PDF, and keeps everything searchable in one interface.

Features

• Automatic organization – watches a folder and imports new PDFs, extracting text (with OCR), then generating categories and tags
• Privacy-first – all processing happens locally with Ollama, no cloud services, no telemetry or analytics
• Fast retrieval – full-text search across content and metadata, plus thumbnail previews
• Disaster-proof – backup and restore your entire library via ZIP
• Multi-language support – UI available in multiple languages
• Dark mode – toggle between light and dark themes

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• Ollama installed locally
• Poppler (for PDF processing)
  • macOS: brew install poppler
  • Ubuntu/Debian: apt-get install poppler-utils
  • Windows: Download from poppler releases
• Tesseract (for OCR on scanned documents)
  • macOS: brew install tesseract
  • Ubuntu/Debian: apt-get install tesseract-ocr
  • Windows: Download from Tesseract releases

Quick start

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/imkrishsub/filefolio.git
cd filefolio

2. Create and activate virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

3. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Start Ollama (in a separate terminal)

ollama serve

5. Run the application

python backend/main.py

6. Open your browser Navigate to: http://127.0.0.1:8000

Configuration

Custom port

Set a custom port using the PORT environment variable:

PORT=8080 python backend/main.py

Testing

pytest

Full API and functionality coverage including unit tests, integration tests, and frontend tests.

Project structure

filefolio/
├── backend/
│   ├── main.py          # FastAPI server
│   └── sync_service.py  # Folder sync service
├── frontend/
│   ├── static/
│   │   ├── app.js       # Frontend JavaScript
│   │   ├── style.css    # Styles
│   │   └── i18n.json    # Translations
│   └── templates/
│       └── index.html   # Main interface
├── tests/               # Test suite
├── uploads/             # PDF storage (created on first run)
├── thumbnails/          # Document thumbnails (created on first run)
├── data/                # Database (created on first run)
├── setup.cfg            # Linting and tool configuration
├── pytest.ini           # Test configuration
└── requirements.txt

How it works

1. Upload - Drag and drop a PDF file into the web interface, or sync a local folder to automatically import new files
2. Extract - Text is extracted from the PDF (with OCR fallback for scanned documents)
3. Analyze - A local LLM analyzes the content to determine category, tags, and suggest a filename
4. Organize - The document is saved with metadata in a local SQLite database
5. Search - Find documents by content, category, tags, or filename

Tech stack

• Backend: FastAPI (Python)
• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript
• Database: SQLite
• AI/LLM: Ollama
• PDF Processing: PyPDF, pdf2image, pytesseract
• Styling: Custom CSS

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.