Read your local files, without uploading them.

Point Presence at a folder. Nothing is copied, nothing uploaded.

Most AI tools that touch local files ask you to upload them — a copy lives on their servers, indexed somewhere, possibly forever. That is fine for a single PDF you do not mind sharing. It is unworkable for the years of accumulated notes, research, project folders and PDFs sitting on your machine that you would like Presence to be able to read.

Modern browsers — Chrome and Edge — expose a permission-gated API that lets a web app read files from a folder on your disk without copying them anywhere. 1Presence uses that. You point at a folder, grant access, and the files stay on your machine. Presence can open them on demand and read what it needs.

1. Open 1Presence in Chrome or Edge on your laptop.
2. Go to Connectors and pick "Local folder."
3. Browser dialog: select the folder you want to expose.
4. Confirm. Presence now has read access to that folder for the session.

You can connect multiple folders, name them ("Project archive", "Research", "Tax 2025"), and grant access to specific agents only. Permission is revocable any time — close the browser, revoke from settings, or just remove the folder.

If you would rather keep some of those files for good, you can import a batch straight into your vault instead — up to a couple of thousand at a time, brought in steadily so nothing stalls.

• "Read through this PDF I just downloaded and summarise it."
• "Find every mention of Maya in my Projects folder."
• "What did I write in my journal in March?" (when the journal is a folder on disk)
• "Pull context from my research folder before we discuss this."
• "What are the headlines across last quarter's client decks?"
• Giving Presence access to years of notes you have on disk without manually uploading anything.

• Browser support. Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers. Safari and Firefox do not implement the File System Access API yet.
• Session-scoped. Browsers re-confirm access on a schedule for safety. You may be asked to re-grant access after a long gap.
• Read-only. Presence reads your local folder; it does not write back to it. Anything it produces lands in your vault, never on your disk.
• Mobile. Phone browsers do not currently expose the API. Use Drive or another connector to give Presence access to the same files from your phone.

No file contents ever leave your machine unless Presence specifically reads a file in the course of answering a question. When it does, that file is held briefly on the server, scoped to the single conversation that read it, so the agent can work with it across the turn — never added to your vault, never shared between sessions, and cleared once the conversation is done. We do not snapshot, mirror, or index your folder.