For Families · 2026-06-04

The family tapes

I have a folder on a hard drive called Old Videos. It is six hundred and forty-three files long. Phone clips of my niece. Wedding footage from three weddings. A whole afternoon of dogs in a backyard in 2017. A two-minute clip of my dad laughing that I think was at a Christmas dinner but I’m not sure which year.

Most of the files are named IMG_2034.MOV.

The folder is unwatchable. Not because the videos are bad. Because there are 643 of them, and any search means dragging the playhead through clips I never bothered to label.

I built Scrubless because of this folder.

Now I type what I remember. “The Christmas where my dad cried at the toast.” “When the dog ran into the lake.” “Grandma laughing at the kid in the snowsuit.” I get a list back, ranked. I click one. I’m there.

I have shown the search-for-a-laugh thing to my mom twice. The first time she didn’t believe it would work. The second time she pulled up “the part where Nina sang happy birthday,” and got back every single birthday across seven years, ranked by how cleanly the moment matched. She watched the oldest one. Then she watched it again. Then she closed the laptop.

That moment is the whole pitch.

There’s also a less emotional thing it does. I had a clip my brother needed for our father’s eulogy and I had thirty minutes before the service. “Dad telling the airport story.” It found it in seven seconds. He had it on his phone five minutes later.

If you have one of these folders, try it. The first clip you find will not be the one you thought you wanted.