Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap) | Hacker News

A developer shared a year-long local video indexing workflow built on a 2021 MacBook using Gemma4-31B with heavy swap.

Each clip gets a .description.md sidecar, plus root-level summaries to make personal video libraries searchable.

Faces and locations are handled by deterministic local tools: insightface/ArcFace for embeddings, EXIF GPS, and Nominatim geocoding.

The LLM is reserved for descriptive tags, mood, shot type, and review decisions rather than identity or location detection.

The setup highlights a practical on-device way to organize large video archives while keeping sensitive metadata local.