Request - Help with media search

Request for help with media search, a repetitive task that could be automated with a tool.

This Actor helps you find media assets by searching a structured catalog using a title query, a file type filter, and a set of required tags. It is designed to automate the repetitive task of manually scanning through media libraries when you need to locate specific items that match several criteria at once.

Use Cases

• Library filtering by title fragment — Pass a partial title like "Matrix" or "Dune" to quickly narrow down catalog entries whose titles contain the query string (case-insensitive).
• Restricting results by file type — Supply a file_type argument (e.g. "video") to exclude any media that does not match the desired format, which is useful when the catalog mixes videos, audio, images, and documents.
• Tag-based drill-down — Require one or more tags such as ["sci-fi"] or ["animation", "family"] to return only assets whose tag list contains every requested tag, enabling precise genre or category filtering.
• Combined multi-criteria searches — Combine a title fragment, a file type, and a tag list in a single search to pinpoint items like animated family films from a specific year or sci-fi videos tagged with a particular theme.
• Catalog-aware metadata lookups — Access structured fields (title, file type, tags, year) returned for each match, so downstream pipelines can programmatically consume the filtered results rather than parsing free-form metadata strings.

How It Works

The Actor wraps a MediaSearchEngine backed by an in-memory list of MediaMetadata records, each holding a title, file type, tag list, and optional year. A regex compiled with re.IGNORECASE is built from the query string and applied to each item's title; items that don't match the title pattern are skipped. When a file_type is supplied, the engine filters out any record whose file_type differs from the requested value. When a tags list is supplied, every requested tag must appear in the record's tag list (compared case-insensitively) for the item to pass. Surviving records are returned as dictionaries exposing the original title, file_type, tags, and year fields for downstream use.

Usage on Apify

Run it directly from the Apify Console ("Start"/"Try for free"), or call it via the API:

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/request-help-with-media-search/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>
Content-Type: application/json
{}

Pricing

Pay-per-event, billed automatically by Apify -- no separate account or payment step:

• Actor start: $0.00005 per GB of memory (minimum one event per run)
• Result: $0.005 per item returned -- this is the primary, usage-based charge

Also independently available at $0.0100 USDC (Base) per call via the x402 payment protocol (POST /tools/request-help-with-media-search) for callers outside the Apify platform.

Example output

Real output captured from this tool's own build-time smoke test (input above):

{
  "status": "success",
  "count": 10,
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "Inception",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "sci-fi",
        "action",
        "dream"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Matrix",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "sci-fi",
        "action"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "Interstellar",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "sci-fi",
        "space",
        "drama"
      ],
      "year": "2014"
    },
    {
      "title": "Spirited Away",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "animation",
        "fantasy"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "Toy Story",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "animation",
        "family"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Godfather",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "crime",
        "drama"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "Blade Runner 2049",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "sci-fi",
        "drama"
      ],
      "year": "2017"
    },
    {
      "title": "Coco",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "animation",
        "family",
        "music"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "Up",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "animation",
        "adventure"
      ],
      "year": "Unknown"
    },
    {
      "title": "Dune",
      "type": "video",
      "tags": [
        "sci-fi",
        "epic"
      ],
      "year": "2021"
    }
  ]
}