Connect AI Assistants
Connect StoryFolder to an AI assistant and you can talk to your footage instead of clicking through it.
Ask which shots are closeups. Ask it to look at the first three shots and tell you what's happening. Ask it to tag twenty shots at once, or start a PDF storyboard while you keep working. It reads the same library you see on screen, and every change it makes is one you can undo.
Pick your assistant to get set up.
Both take a few minutes. Claude is the quicker of the two.
What you can ask for
Here are the kinds of things people actually ask. Things to try has more, with the answers they came back with.
| You say | What you get |
|---|---|
| "What's in my library?" | Your projects, with shot counts and durations |
| "Show me shots 1 to 4 of the hoodie ad" | The actual frames, so it can see them and describe them |
| "Which shots have no Shot Size filled in?" | Every gap in your notes, across one project or all of them |
| "Tag shots 4 through 9 as B-roll" | Written to all six at once, as a single undo |
| "Export a PDF storyboard" | Queued in the background while you keep working |
| "Give me the shot list as a spreadsheet" | An XLSX export with timecodes |
| "What did you change in here?" | The list of its own edits, so you can roll them back |
A few limits worth knowing up front:
- It searches your notes, not the picture. "Find the closeups" works if you have a field where closeups are recorded. If you don't, ask it to look at the frames and fill that field in — then the search works from then on.
- It can see up to twelve frames at a time. A forty-shot video takes a few passes.
- StoryFolder has to be open. The assistant reads the running app, not your files.
Your footage stays on your computer
"AI integration" usually means uploading your media somewhere. This doesn't.
The connection runs on your computer and talks to StoryFolder locally. Your video files are never uploaded. There's no account to make and no key to paste. Close StoryFolder and the whole thing stops working, which is the behaviour you want.
The one thing that does travel is whatever the assistant sends to its own AI service — the same as if you'd typed it into the chat box yourself. So if a shot note is confidential, treat it the way you'd treat anything you paste into a chat. Read-only mode doesn't change this: it stops the assistant writing, not reading.
The technical version
The connector reaches StoryFolder over loopback — 127.0.0.1, the network interface that never leaves the machine. When StoryFolder starts, it writes a small handshake file into your user folder holding the port it picked and a token for that session. The connector reads that file before each request. No StoryFolder is running, no token, nothing works.
Let it read, but not edit
There's a Read-only switch. Turn it on and the assistant can read everything and change nothing — not by accident, not by misunderstanding you, and not by being talked into it. The editing tools aren't hidden from it, they're not offered to it at all.
With read-only on it can still list your projects, read your shots and notes, look at frames, search your library, and check on exports. What it loses is renaming, tagging, adding note fields, importing and exporting.
You'll find the switch during setup on either platform, and you can change your mind later. It's a checkbox, not a commitment.
Every edit is undoable
When the assistant changes something, it goes through the same path the app itself uses. The change lands in StoryFolder's Version history, tagged as made by an assistant rather than by you.
So you can open Version history, see exactly which entries came from the assistant, and roll back those. Tagging twenty shots counts as one entry and one undo, the same as a multi-select edit you make by hand.
You can also ask directly: "what have you changed in this project?"
What you need
- StoryFolder, open. If it's closed, the assistant tells you so in plain words and nothing else happens.
- A desktop assistant. Claude Desktop, or ChatGPT's Codex tools. This runs on your computer, so a browser tab or a phone can't reach it.
- A few minutes.
Check it worked
Restart your assistant with StoryFolder open, then ask:
What projects are in my StoryFolder library?
You should get your real project names back, with shot counts and durations. If you don't, troubleshooting covers the usual causes.