navig-explore

A universal local media/data explorer for ANY folder. Buckets files by type (image/gif/video/audio/text/document/archive), auto-reads Telegram exports, previews everything, and organizes by drag-to-class. Non-destructive.

Works on its own — its own CLI, no navig required · v0.2.0 · PyPI

On its own (no navig needed)

pip install navig-explore
navig-explore --help   # no navig needed

With navig

pip install navig-explore
navig explore --help

Commands

Command	What it does
navig explore audio-sort	🎧 Sort audio by CONTENT — music / voice / sfx — from the waveform, not the filename.
navig explore audio-undo	↩️ Put every file an audio-sort run moved back where it came from.
navig explore collect	🎯 Pull a themed selection (e.g. --res 4K --year 2024) into an edit folder via hardlinks (no copy).
navig explore dedup	🎯 Find exact + identical-pixel (auto-trash) and near (flag-only) duplicates.
navig explore gallery	🖼️ Build a shareable offline gallery.html — cached thumbnails, live filter, lightbox.
navig explore merge-episode	🎬 Merge an episode's clips into one lossless RAW file (MPEG-TS concat; skips corrupt clips).
navig explore open	🔎 Browse & organize a folder in the local web UI (the default for navig explore <folder>).
navig explore photos arrange	🗂️ Folders per person, year, place or kind — as links, moving nothing.
navig explore photos arrange-remove	↩️ Delete an arranged folder tree. Originals are never affected.
navig explore photos classes	🏷️ Re-decide what each file IS — file metadata first, guess second.
navig explore photos dates	📅 Recover capture dates EXIF no longer holds — and record HOW.
navig explore photos events	📅 Work out which occasion each photograph belongs to.
navig explore photos explain	🔍 Show every fact the catalog holds about one photo, and where it came from.
navig explore photos faces	🙂 Find and embed faces — only in files that are actually photographs.
navig explore photos gallery	🖼️ A browsable page of the library, filtered by person, year, place and kind.
navig explore photos index	🧠 Read every photo ONCE — hash, measure, embed and classify it.
navig explore photos organize	🖼️ File photos into /YYYY/YYYY-MM by EXIF, quarantine litter and salvage.
navig explore photos people cluster	Group the detected faces. Names you have already assigned are preserved.
navig explore photos people list	Show face groups, biggest first.
navig explore photos people merge	Fold groups together — clustering always over-splits the same person.
navig explore photos people name	Name a group and lock it, so re-clustering never loses the name.
navig explore photos people sheet	🖼️ One row of faces per group, labelled with the id — so you can name them.
navig explore photos people split	Detach a group so the next cluster run re-derives it.
navig explore photos places	🌍 Work out where photos were taken — GPS, neighbours, then folder names.
navig explore photos search	🔎 Find photos by what is IN them — plus person, place, year and kind.
navig explore photos status	📊 What the vision catalog currently knows about this library.
navig explore photos subjects	🏷️ Tag what photographs are OF — sunsets, food, the sea, cars, concerts.
navig explore photos triage	🗂️ Plan the split: real photos vs webcam vs screenshots vs web litter.
navig explore photos triage-undo	↩️ Put every file a triage run moved back where it came from.
navig explore photos undo	↩️ Put every file a photos-organize run moved back where it came from.
navig explore photos views	🗂️ Build the whole organised tree: year, event, person, place, screenshots.
navig explore photos views-remove	↩️ Delete the organised tree. Your photos are never affected.
navig explore probe	📐 Extract width/height/codec/date/GPS/camera → .mediaexplorer/meta.jsonl (resumable).
navig explore route	🚚 Route media to the master library. Default: PLAN (manifest only). --apply to move.
navig explore undo	↩️ Put every file a quarantine / photos-organize run moved back where it was.
navig telegram-exports audit	Chained-move-aware integrity check: prove no export was lost.
navig telegram-exports dedupe	Find loose files that are byte-identical to a copy already inside their export.
navig telegram-exports match	Pair loose downloaded files back to the source chat by original name (+ exact size).
navig telegram-exports organize	File loose ChatExport_* folders at ROOT into Category/Chat/Date.
navig telegram-exports verify	Re-classify filed exports and report any that no longer match their category.

NAVIG Explore module — a universal local media/data explorer for ANY folder. Buckets files by type (image/gif/video/audio/text/document/archive), auto-reads Telegram exports, and previews everything. A first-party navig plugin (free, toggleable).

License: Apache-2.0 · Version: 0.1.0

What it is

navig-explore is a first-party NAVIG plugin — it extends NAVIG itself (CLI verbs + gateway routes), and it is free and toggleable. Point it at any folder and it buckets the files by type, previews them, and understands Telegram chat exports. Plugins are different from blocks: a plugin adds capabilities to the platform; a block is an outcome you apply with navig apply.

Commands

navig explore <folder>              # bucket + preview any folder's files by type
navig explore audio-sort <dir>      # sort audio by CONTENT: music / voice / sfx
navig explore audio-undo <log>      # put an audio-sort run back exactly as it was
navig explore photos organize <dir> # file a photo library by EXIF capture date
navig explore photos undo <log>     # put a photos run back exactly as it was
navig telegram-exports <path>       # read a Telegram data export

photos organize — date a photo library without wrecking it

Files photos into <date-root>/YYYY/YYYY-MM/ from EXIF capture dates, quarantines litter and undatable recovery salvage, and optionally moves video out of the photo tree.

navig explore probe   "X:\Photos"                    # capture dates (required)
navig explore dedup   "X:\Photos"                    # duplicate copies (optional)
navig explore photos organize "X:\Photos" \
    --video-dest "X:\Video\from-photos"              # PLAN only — review the CSV
navig explore photos organize "X:\Photos" --apply    # execute

dedup reports three classes, and only the first two are ever auto-quarantined:

class	what it is	auto-trash
exact	byte-identical	yes
identical-pixels	decodes to the same image, differs only in container/metadata	yes
near-image / near-video	perceptually close (resize, crop, re-encode)	no — human decides

identical-pixels is the class byte-hashing structurally cannot see: re-saving a JPEG or writing one EXIF tag changes every byte while leaving every pixel untouched. On a real family album, 184 of 210 name collisions were exactly this — SHA-256 alone would have kept all 184 as (1) twins of photos already in the library. It costs no extra I/O (the digest is taken during the decode the perceptual pass already performs), needs only a decoder — not imagehash — and keeps the copy carrying the most metadata. Opt out with photos organize --no-pixel-dupes, or skip the decode pass entirely with dedup --exact-only.

Acting on the report — --quarantine:

navig explore dedup "X:\Photos"                 # report only
navig explore dedup "X:\Photos" --quarantine    # ...and move the redundant copies
navig explore undo  "<log printed above>"       # put every one of them back

Redundant copies move to <root>/.trash/dupes/ keeping their relative path — nothing is deleted. Only exact and identical-pixels are moved; a near-image cluster is often a burst of consecutive shots rather than one photo twice, so those are always left for a human. Overlapping groups are merged into connected components first, so a file that is byte-identical to one copy and pixel-identical to a third resolves to exactly one survivor in a single pass, and a group can never lose every copy.

What it refuses to do, and why it matters on a real archive:

• Never flattens human-named folders. A real date tree is not uniform — it holds 2009/Alzon 2009, 2009/14 juillet 2009, 2014/Берлин 2014. Those names are the best organisation in the library and nothing can rebuild them. Only YYYY-MM buckets, YYYY-00 stubs, dd.mm.yy day folders and folders you declare with --loose are ever reshaped; curated collections are read-only.
• Never invents a date. Capture dates come from EXIF only — never mtime. Archives assembled by recovery tools carry meaningless timestamps (that is how 1970 and 2031 folders appear). No capture date ⇒ the photo stays undated instead of being filed under a guess.
• Never mistakes a caption for litter. A zero-byte .txt is often the only description a folder has, with the filename as the note (a la plage.txt).
• Never deletes. Quarantine moves to <root>/.trash/{junk,tiny,dupes} keeping the original relative path, and every run writes an undo log as it goes — a run killed halfway is still fully reversible via photos undo.

Plan-by-default is the review gate: the first invocation only writes .mediaexplorer/photos-plan.csv.

audio-sort — sort a sound dump by what it sounds like

Ripped clips have useless names (#fyp_#viral_7593….m4a) and no tags, so bucketing by type or filename can't tell a song from someone talking. audio-sort decides from the waveform, using ffmpeg + numpy only — no model download, no GPU:

navig explore audio-sort "X:\Audio\TikTok\music" \
  --learn music="X:\Audio\Music\Genres" \
  --learn voice="X:\Audio\Spoken Word" \
  --learn sfx="X:\Audio\SFX\Foley Sound Effects" \
  --route music="X:\Audio\Production\Video Edit Music" \
  --route voice="X:\Audio\TikTok\voices" \
  --route sfx="X:\Audio\SFX\TikTok Sounds" \
  --min-conf 0.6 --apply

It trains on folders you already sorted, prints a cross-validated accuracy before touching anything, and defaults to plan-only. Anything below --min-conf goes to _review/ rather than being guessed at, sidecars (.md transcripts) travel with their audio, name collisions are suffixed rather than overwritten, and every move is logged so audio-undo restores the folder exactly.

Targeted cleanup. --min-dur / --max-dur / --keep narrow what a run may touch, so you can fix the misfits without reorganising the folder:

# pull the hour-long albums out of a sound-effects library,
# and leave the actual sound effects exactly where they are
navig explore audio-sort "X:\Audio\SFX" --model model.json \
  --route "music=X:\Audio\Music\Recovered from SFX" \
  --route "voice=X:\Audio\Spoken Word\Recovered from SFX" \
  --keep sfx --min-dur 120 --apply

Out-of-scope files are reported as leave in the plan rather than filtered out — a plan that silently omitted them would look like it covered the folder when it deliberately did not.

If faster-whisper is installed, its bundled Silero VAD adds speech-activity features — the strongest single cue for "is someone talking?".

Install

It ships in the NAVIG monorepo and loads automatically when NAVIG is installed. To add/enable it explicitly:

navig plugin add navig-explore

Check wiring and toggle state:

navig store list

Development

This package lives in the NAVIG monorepo under plugins/navig-explore/. It registers via the navig.plugins entry-point group; CLI verbs register via navig.commands.