jFile NLP - just ask.

A multi-pane file manager that understands what you're looking for. Describe the files you need in plain English - or speak your query - and jFile translates your intent into powerful searches across local drives, external volumes, and network shares.

🗣️ Natural Language Search

Combine many search dimensions in a single plain-English query - no syntax to memorize.

How it works: your sentence is turned into search filters entirely on your Mac - nothing about the query leaves the machine. Ask for several things at once and jFile keeps all of them, and it shows you how it read your request before it runs the search.

Search by

• Name - starts with, ends with, contains, exact match, or several patterns OR'd together (wildcards supported)
• File type - broad kinds like documents, images, audio and video, families like Office, iWork, Adobe and CAD, and combinations of them in a single query (“excel and log files”)
• Size & date - ranges and relative terms; by date created, modified, or added
• Content - text inside the file, via Spotlight
• macOS tags & Finder colors, Finder comments, and folder path

Dimensions combine naturally - e.g. “large PDFs named ‘report’ modified last month containing ‘Q4’” runs as one query.

Works everywhere

One search bar for everything you own. jFile searches your startup disk, your external drives, and folders macOS has never indexed - and the same bar reaches straight into your servers: SMB, FTP/FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Dropbox and S3, without mounting first from Finder. On a server it matches name, type, size and modified date, and where the server cannot answer part of your query - file contents, tags, comments and owner among them - jFile names that filter on screen for SMB, FTP/FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV and Dropbox searches, so you can see when a result list came back broader than you asked. NFS shares are searched as soon as they are mounted on the Mac.

Column Filter Dropdowns

Interactive dropdown filters are a second way to search - use them instead of a typed query, or alongside one. They narrow by Name (extension presets, wildcards), Size, Modified date, Kind (Folder, Document, Image, Audio, Video, Archive, Application), Attributes (hidden, system, read-only), and Finder color tags.

🎤 Voice Search

Dictate your query hands-free with on-device macOS Dictation in English (en-US) - Dictation needs to be switched on in System Settings. Your spoken words fill the search field - then press Search (or Return) to run it. Perfect for when your hands are full or you're working across the room.

🧠 On-Device AI Insights

Select any document and jFile reads it on your Mac to surface a concise summary, automatic tags, and related files - all computed locally, and marked with an On-Device badge in the panel.

How it works: Apple Intelligence, Vision OCR, and the Natural Language framework, all running locally on your Mac.

• Reads almost anything - photos, scans, and image-only PDFs via Vision OCR; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, legacy .doc, RTF, HTML, and plain text
• Transcribe audio & video - right-click → Transcribe to Text for on-device speech-to-text
• Inline Writing Tools - optionally proofread, rewrite, and summarise text right inside jFile's document editor and preview. jFile leaves Writing Tools switched off there until you turn it on in Settings → General, where it explains what may be sent to the cloud before you do. *
• Shortcuts - ask “Find Documents in jFile” through App Intents

* Apple Writing Tools - the one jFile feature that can hand your text to Apple. (macOS itself can also act on selected text through its own menus - Translate and other system text Services - wherever text is selectable. Those are Apple’s, not jFile’s; jFile removes Translate from the context menus of the text it shows you to read or edit - file comments, extracted text, and the document editor and preview.) Writing Tools (proofread, rewrite, summarise) is off by default: you switch it on yourself in Settings → General, where jFile explains exactly what may leave your Mac before you enable it. It works on the text you are editing - the passage you select, or the open document if you select nothing - and never on a file you have not opened in the editor. For longer or more complex requests, Apple Intelligence may process that selected text in Apple’s Private Cloud Compute rather than on your Mac. Apple decides per request whether it needs Private Cloud Compute, and states this data isn’t stored or made accessible to Apple. Leave it off and everything in jFile - natural-language and voice search, OCR, image recognition, and document Insights - runs entirely on-device.

🖼️ See Inside Your Images

jFile reads your pictures. The text written inside them and what they actually show both become searchable, so an image is as findable as a document - computed entirely on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is tracked.

• Read the text inside images (OCR) - receipts, screenshots, whiteboard photos, scanned forms, signs, and slides become searchable like any document. Find “invoice”, “boarding pass”, or a phrase you photographed on a slide and the matching images surface instantly.
• Find images by what they show - jFile recognizes what is in a picture - dogs (and breeds), cats, horses, food, plants, vehicles, documents and screenshots - plus people, barcodes and QR codes, and the subject’s dominant color. Just ask: “pictures of dogs”, “photos of food”.
• Colors, categories, and exclusions - stack modifiers and carve out what you don't want: “pictures of black dogs”, “images of animals except dogs”, “images with text”, “images of black dogs except puppies”. Broad categories work too - “images of animals” finds your dog, cat, horse, and bird photos, because jFile understands a golden retriever is a dog is an animal. Everyday plurals just work.
• You choose what gets indexed - a single dialog lets you index the current location (new images, or rebuild the folder), all volumes in one pass (granting access to more drives on the spot), or just selected folders - even straight from a search result.
• Built for big libraries - indexing shows a live count as it scans and can be canceled any time from the status bar. A background pass, on by default, also indexes images in the folders you have granted jFile access to: it runs while your Mac is plugged in, slows down while you are using it, and can be turned off in Settings → General → Image Search.
• Find similar images - right-click any picture to filter that folder down to it plus its closest visual look-alikes, with a live match count - ideal for near-duplicates, resized copies, and icon size variants. It compares the images in that one folder, not its subfolders, and narrows the panel to the reference image plus its nearest look-alikes.
• Extract text from any image - right-click → Extract Text to File… to OCR a single picture into an editable, savable window

👁️ Preview Almost Any File

Click a file and it opens right in the preview panel. jFile renders professional formats macOS cannot preview on its own - CAD and drafting drawings, layered design documents, and EPS and QOI artwork - plus Illustrator files as zoomable vector art, as well as everything the Mac already shows.

Everything is rendered on your Mac. No file is uploaded, nothing needs an internet connection, and a format jFile does not render itself falls back to the system preview rather than a blank pane.

And there is no format list to consult for the everyday files: if macOS can identify it as text, code, audio or video, jFile previews it - along with the image formats macOS can decode, camera RAW included.

🧰 More Capabilities

⚡ Fast where it counts

Bulk copying bogs down on the number of files, not the number of megabytes. A folder of thousands of small files is where a file manager either flies or crawls - and jFile copies 5,000 files in about seven tenths of a second, roughly two and a half times faster than the copy tools built into macOS on the same files, the same drives and the same Mac.

It starts instantly, too: jFile does not measure the whole folder tree before the first byte moves, so a big folder begins copying the moment you confirm it.

Measured on macOS 26.6.2, Apple Silicon: 5,000 files of 8 KB each copied between two APFS SSDs, against the system’s own cp and ditto, seven runs per tool with the disk cache dropped before every run and the same result warm. One very large file is limited by the drive rather than the software - jFile is no quicker with those, and we measured that too rather than guess.

Get jFile NLP

Available today on the Mac App Store.

macOS 26 or later · Apple Silicon (M1 or later) · No subscription · No account, no tracking - your files, folder names and searches stay on your Mac

Privacy Policy

A Finder alternative with no subscription

jFile NLP is a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store - $4.99 on the US store, with pricing set per country - no subscription, no in-app purchase, no account. It is a multi-pane Finder alternative that adds a natural-language search bar that runs entirely on your Mac: describe the files you want in an ordinary sentence and jFile turns it into the search.

jFile NLP pairs natural-language search with a professional multi-pane file manager. Stop remembering complex search syntax - just describe what you need.

Guides: search Mac files in plain English · search inside images (OCR).

While you're here, check out jBrowse - the fast, privacy-focused iOS browser.

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