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Local vs cloud
StoryFolder is a hybrid desktop + cloud app. Knowing exactly what lives where helps you make confident decisions about confidential or sensitive videos.
What's local-only?
These never leave your computer:
- Your video files, whether you imported them from disk or downloaded them via a URL.
- The full-resolution thumbnail cache used by the editor.
- The local working database with your project state.
- App preferences (UI settings, column widths, release channel).
- Transcription. Speech recognition runs as a process on your own computer, on audio taken from the local file. Your audio is never uploaded to be transcribed, and no third-party transcription service is involved. Speaker identification runs locally too.
- Shot detection, which also runs on your machine.
What's synced to our servers?
- Your account info — email, name, password hash, subscription state.
- Your projects' metadata — project titles, source URLs (not the video), settings.
- Your shot lists — start times, durations, frame ranges.
- Your notes — every value in every note field, across default and custom.
- Your activated machine fingerprints — used to validate your machine slot.
What does AI Autofill send?
AI Autofill is the one feature that sends your footage's pictures off the machine. For each shot in a run it sends:
- One frame from that shot, to StoryFolder's server and on to a hosted vision model.
- The context around it — your field names, types, options and descriptions, the run's instructions, and the video's title, description and video-level field values.
The video file itself is never uploaded. But Autofill needs an internet connection every time, and it is not local. Don't read "local" as an app-wide promise: transcription is local, Autofill is not. Privacy & sharing is the current authority on what each AI feature sends.
What gets uploaded when I publish a share link?
When you publish, StoryFolder uploads:
- A copy of the thumbnails for the visible shots to a CDN so web viewers can see them.
- The same shot list and notes that are already on the server.
- Your privacy settings (public / link-only / password).
The original video file is still not uploaded. For URL imports, the published page embeds the original source (YouTube) using its own URL.
What if I import a confidential video?
If you're working with confidential or pre-release material:
- The video itself stays on your computer. Importing it does not upload it.
- Your notes do go to our servers (so they sync). Treat them with the same level of confidentiality as the video — they describe the video.
- Don't publish a share link unless you're cleared to. Or, if you must share, use password protection to limit exposure.
If you have strict requirements (NDAs, air-gapped environments), contact us. We can talk through your options.
Can I work fully offline?
The editor and most note-taking work fine offline once a video is imported. Things that require an internet connection:
- Signing in / activating a new machine.
- URL imports (obviously).
- Publishing or updating share links.
- AI field discovery (calls a server-side model).
- AI Autofill (sends a frame per shot to a hosted vision model, every run).
- Downloading the transcription engine and a model — once each, from StoryFolder's servers. Once they're on disk, transcription itself runs with the network off.
- License validation (runs occasionally; will use a cached license for short outages).
Does my data stay synced across machines?
Yes. Sign in on a second computer and your shot lists and notes appear there too. The video files themselves need to be re-imported on the new machine (since they're local).