What is Poly?

Poly is a web & desktop file browser application that helps you organize and explore your files in a natural way. Search in casual language and find results down to the exact page, timestamp, or frame. Enable your agents to work with complex file types like multimedia, e-books, and hi-res photographs. And easily view what your entire file system looked like at any point in the past with Poly's breakthrough "flashback" mode.

Key Features

• Modern, beautiful file browser: use the web or desktop application to have a fast, offline-first file browser no matter what platform you're on. Navigation is lightning fast with our sync engine. Uploads and downloads are even faster with Poly's transfer engine.
• Natural language search: Search inside your files with natural language that's gives you results down to the exact timestamp, page, paragraph, or frame. Built on years of research in omni-modal intelligence, Poly gives you unparalleled real-time insight into your files.
• Agentic file harness: Poly gives agents a file harness that lets them access more file types than ever before, with faster responses and up to 20x fewer tokens. Poly's file system automatically parses, transcribes, and indexes your files, creating precise formats to maximize agent understanding. Use our plugin with leading agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and VS Code.
• Flashback mode: Poly automatically tracks every change to your files both offline and online, giving you granular, interactive access to your file history. Go into flashback mode at any time to see exactly what your files looked like at any point in the past, down to the second. Rollback your files, or whole folders in a click.
• Embedded Agent: Open the agent sidebar to get answers about your files, quickly. The agent sees what you see, so you can ask it about the file you're reading, or the folder you're browsing. Ask it to summarize, explain, or even edit your files. Automate tasks like organizing a folder. Or even ask the agent to find files on the web that match your request, and let the agent automatically pull and store them in your Poly file system.
• Shared Drives, Folders, and Files: Share your files with anyone, anywhere. Invite collaborators to a shared drive, or share a single file or folder with a link. Poly's sharing system is built for security and privacy, so you can control exactly who has access to your files, with granular, hierarchical permissions. Limit access to agents separately from humans.
• Offline first and secure: Poly is designed to work seamlessly offline, ensuring you can access and manage your files even without an internet connection. All your data is encrypted and stored securely in a local enclave. As you browse, your files are automatically synced. Changes appear without you having to refresh, and conflicts are automatically resolved for you.

How Poly works

When you upload a file to Poly, it does more than just store the bytes. In the background, Poly:

1. Extracts metadata—dimensions, duration, EXIF, ID3, and a plethora of other file-specific details that you can see from the details panel
2. Generates a searchable full-text index of the file's content (OCR, transcripts, and more).
3. Creates a dense tensor embedding that capture the semantic meaning of the file at multiple levels of granularity, so you search for activities in videos, particular image features, or descriptions of document content.
4. Transcodes and compresses your files into versions that are optimized for agentic processing. Images are precisely sized to maximize agent understanding and minimize token use. Audio and video are transcoded into efficient formats. Complex file types are rendered into canonical representations.
5. Stores everything in a durable, cloud-backed encrypted storage plane so it's instantly available across all your devices in real-time. The local cache is automatically updated as you browse, so you can work offline without you having to configure anything or refresh.

This background work is what powers Poly's smart search and AI features. By the time you go looking for a file, Poly already knows what's in it.

Key concepts

• Home — your personal file space. Everything you upload goes here by default.
• Shared Drives — collaborative spaces where a team can store and access files together. Shared drives have their own storage quota and permission settings.
• Smart Search — Poly's search understands natural language, not just filenames. Ask for "invoices from last quarter" or "photos of the team" and Poly finds the right files.
• AI Agent — the built-in assistant that can read files, answer questions, write content, and organize your storage on your behalf.
• Offline Cache — a local copy of your file metadata and frequently accessed files, so Poly keeps working even without an internet connection.

Where to go next

• Installation — set up the desktop or mobile app
• Quickstart — get your first files into Poly in under 5 minutes
• Migrate to Poly — bring files over from Google Drive, Dropbox, or another service