Getting Started
Install Harvestry, import your first video, and produce a study document in under five minutes.
Requirements
Before installing, confirm your Mac meets these minimum specifications:
- macOS 15 Sequoia or later — Harvestry uses APIs introduced in macOS 15.
- Apple Silicon (M1 or later) — WhisperKit transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine, which is only available on Apple Silicon Macs. Intel Macs are not supported.
- 4 GB free disk space minimum — The Small Whisper model requires roughly 250 MB; the Large Turbo model roughly 800 MB. Allow additional space for video files and exports.
- Internet connection for URL import — Importing from YouTube, Vimeo, or other sites requires network access. Local file import works entirely offline.
- Internet connection for Claude consolidation — If you enable the Claude API consolidation mode, your transcript is sent to Anthropic over HTTPS. Ollama consolidation and everything else runs locally.
Installation
Click Download for macOS on the Harvestry website. Save the Harvestry.dmg file to your Downloads folder.
Double-click Harvestry.dmg to mount it. In the window that opens, drag the Harvestry icon onto the Applications folder alias.
Open Harvestry from your Applications folder or Spotlight. On first launch, macOS may show a Gatekeeper dialog — click Open to proceed. Harvestry automatically strips the quarantine attribute from its bundled tools so they work immediately without requiring your password.
When the app opens, go to Settings → Transcription and download at least the Small model before you process your first video. The download is about 250 MB and takes a minute or so on a fast connection.
Your First Import
Once the Whisper model has downloaded, import a video file to get started.
Click the + button in the top-left corner of the sidebar, or use the menu bar: File → Import Video.
The Import sheet has two tabs: Video File and URL. For your first import, use the Video File tab.
Click Choose File and select a .mp4, .mov, or .m4v video. The file picker accepts any of these formats.
After selecting the file, a new lecture entry appears in the left sidebar with a Ready status badge. The video has been registered but not yet processed — no transcription or screenshot work has happened yet.
to start transcription
Your First Processing Run
With the lecture selected in the sidebar, you're ready to process it.
The green Begin Processing button appears in the detail view toolbar when a lecture is in the Ready state. Click it to start.
Transcription and screenshot capture run in parallel. You'll see progress bars on each step and live log messages in the transcript panel. The Apple Neural Engine handles transcription while the GPU handles frame extraction — both finish faster than you'd expect.
All four pipeline steps turn green with checkmarks. The status badge in the sidebar changes to Complete. For a one-hour lecture, expect roughly 2–5 minutes on an M1 Mac with the Small model.
Click the Open in Browser button. Your default browser opens the exported index.html — a self-contained study document with your full transcript, screenshots at key moments, and an audio player that highlights each word as it plays.
What You Get
Every processed lecture produces a folder at your configured export location (default: ~/HarvestryLibrary/YYYY-MM-DD Title/). The folder contains:
- index.html — The study document. Open this in any browser.
- styles.css — The stylesheet, bundled alongside the HTML.
- audio.m4a — Audio extracted from the video, used by the in-page audio player.
- images/ — JPEG screenshots captured at key moments during the lecture.
The HTML page includes:
- The full transcript, broken into readable passages with timestamp labels.
- Screenshots embedded in the timeline at the moments they were captured.
- An audio player with per-word highlight sync — click any word to seek the audio to that moment.
- A font-size slider and dark-mode toggle, both persisted across browser sessions.
- If you enabled LLM consolidation: a second tab with polished, structured study notes.