Share one library safely
Give each person on your network their own account, with roles and permissions that control what they can see and do. Share links cover everything else.
Security docsCove
Cove turns your folders of videos, images, and audio into a fast, searchable library. It's free, open source, and runs entirely on your own machine. No account, no cloud.
Search, tags, and watch history Downloaders and extensions Safe sharing on your network
Default 
Dark Midnight 
Dark Emerald 
Dark Rose 
Copper Noir 
Golden Hour 
Signal Dark 
Liquid Glass 
Sunset Gradient 
Cyberpunk 
Deep Space 
Synthwave 
Ember 
Cinema Dark 
Dark Ocean 
Rainbow Start in minutes
Point Cove at a folder and start browsing.
The first scan builds your library, and search, tags, filters, and generated previews work right away. The deeper features stay out of the way until you want them: tagging the people in a scene, marking segments inside a video, groups that fill themselves based on rules, separate accounts for the people on your network, and an extension system for everything else.
Detailed organization
Tag people, moments, and parts of a video
Cove keeps videos, images, galleries, audio, and text in one library, connected by the performers, studios, tags, and groups behind them. When a tag only applies to one person or one part of a video, you can put it exactly there.
- See who appears in which part of a video, not just who's in it somewhere.
- Build compilations and sub-videos without duplicating files on disk.
- Let dynamic groups collect matching content on their own.
Browsing
Browse it like a library, or scroll it like a feed
Grid and list pages are there when you want to sort and clean up. Feed and vertical pages are there when you just want to watch. Watch later, history, and continue watching make it easy to pick up where you left off.
- Six page styles: grid, list, wall, tagger, feed, and vertical.
- Keep scrolling instead of clicking through page after page.
- Resume anything from continue watching.
Search
Find things by whatever you remember
Search by title, tag, performer, studio, path, or group. Start broad with global search, then add filters when you need to narrow a big library down to one specific thing.
- One search across videos, images, galleries, audio, and text.
- Save the searches you keep coming back to.
- Jump straight to a person, tag, or group from anywhere in the app.
Bring in new media
Downloaders pull content in, and scrapers identify it and fill in the details. You review what gets applied, and Cove keeps track of where details came from.
Metadata and downloader docsExtend almost anything
Extensions can add downloaders, scrapers, pages, background jobs, settings, APIs, and themes. If Cove doesn't do something yet, there's probably a way to add it.
Extension guide
Private by default
Your library stays on your hardware
Cove runs where you install it. Your files, metadata, accounts, and generated previews stay on the machine unless you set up sharing yourself, and sharing is scoped to the people and content you choose.
- No telemetry.
- No cloud account between you and your own files.
- Works for one person or a whole household.
Ready to try it?
Download the native app or run it with Docker. Either way, Cove sets itself up on first launch and you can start scanning right away.
Download CoveWant to read more first?
Start with a supported installation, open the User Guide for everyday tasks, or use Developer and Reference for deeper work and exact behavior.
Open docs