PDF Organizer
Drop papers, books, manuals, and research PDFs into Mindly with one shortcut. AI tags them, summarizes the long ones, and connects them to your other saves.
macOS 14+ · 4.8 / 5 from 25k+ users · Your PDF library stays on your Mac
How it works
No folders to design, no tags to invent. Save a PDF, walk away, and come back to a library that already makes sense.
Press ⌘M from anywhere on your Mac, or drag a PDF onto Mindly's window. The capture overlay appears on top of whatever you're doing. No folder picker, no "where should this go" decision. The file lands in your library in under a second.
Mindly extracts the full text (including OCR for scanned PDFs), generates a short summary, applies topic and method tags, and detects connections to PDFs and notes you already have. All in a few seconds, in the background, without you watching.
"That paper about attention from last semester" finds it even when you don't remember the title or the author. Search hits content inside the PDF, not just filenames. Semantic search picks up paraphrases, related concepts, and synonyms.
Switch to the spatial view and your PDFs appear as nodes with AI-detected connections drawn between them. Clusters form around topics you didn't know you'd built up. The Cal Newport book links to the article on attention you saved months ago.
In the app
Mindly shows your PDFs how they actually relate, not just as a folder list.
A unified feed of every PDF you've saved. Each one shows an AI-generated summary line, topic tags, and a timestamp. Filter by project Space, scroll the whole archive, or jump to "recent" to find what you saved this week. You know what a PDF is about without opening it.
Open any PDF inline with Mindly's preview pane. Add highlights, type margin notes, voice-memo your reactions. Everything you add stays linked to the source. Come back six months later and your annotations are right where you left them.
Switch to spatial mode and your PDFs become nodes in a graph. AI-detected edges connect papers that share arguments, methods, or topics. The view rewards browsing: you'll find pairings you'd never have searched for on purpose.
When this matters
Same library, four very different workflows.
Stop losing the paper you cited last semester. AI tags by topic and method so it surfaces when relevant, six months later.
Save the PDF alongside your notes about it. AI summary on long PDFs makes scanning fast before re-reading.
The macOS shortcut sheet, that tax doc, the appliance manual. Search them by what they're about, not filename.
Contracts, briefs, deliverables organized by project Space. AI handles the sorting; you handle the work.
Why Mindly
Most PDF managers are file browsers with tags. Mindly is a second brain that happens to handle PDFs alongside everything else.
Not just filename indexing. Mindly extracts the full text, generates a summary, applies semantic tags, and indexes the content. Even scanned PDFs are OCR'd on-device. The PDF becomes a first-class searchable item, not a sealed file.
Your PDFs sit next to your notes, voice memos, web clippings, and screenshots. Search "attention research" and you get the paper, your own notes on it, the article you bookmarked, and the voice memo where you reacted. All in one query.
Mindly does not upload your PDFs to a cloud library. The originals live in your Mindly directory on disk. AI processing runs over encrypted channels and content is not stored on Mindly's servers (see privacy policy).
A PDF you save today should still be findable in five years. Mindly's tagging stays consistent, the library survives across Macs (with sync where applicable), and the mind map keeps surfacing forgotten papers when they become relevant.
FAQ
Yes. Mindly handles standard text PDFs (most papers, ebooks, manuals) and runs on-device OCR for image-only or scanned PDFs. The extracted text becomes searchable and gets the same AI tagging treatment as native text PDFs.
In a Mindly directory on your Mac. The original files are on disk, not in a cloud vault. Mindly indexes them and provides the AI layer, but the file ownership is yours and survives even if you stop using the app.
Mindly's AI organization is multilingual. PDFs in German, Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian, and other major languages get tagged accurately, and semantic search works across languages too.
The Free tier supports up to 25 items total (PDFs count as items). Mindly Pro removes the limit and handles thousands of PDFs comfortably. Heavy users routinely keep multi-GB libraries on Pro.
Yes. Drag a folder into Mindly and every PDF inside gets imported, indexed, summarized, and tagged. The original folder structure is preserved as a Space, so your existing organization carries over.
The library is indexed locally, so search stays fast regardless of size. AI processing happens in the background when you save, so the UI never hangs. Pro plans get priority processing for instant turnaround.
Pricing
Free
Up to 25 items (PDFs count as items). AI summaries on every save. Mind map view. Plain-language search.
Pro
Unlimited PDFs. Better AI summaries. Priority processing. Voice notes with transcription, themes, and smarter suggestions.
Also in Mindly
Get started
Drop in the next ten PDFs you'd normally lose. See how the library shapes itself.