a macOS canvas for photographers · built for one, shared with friends

Make a mess.
Sort it out.

A big table for your photos. Drop hundreds on it, push them around, make piles. Fast at any zoom.

All features Showcase

Runs on your Mac. Your photos never leave it. No account, no cloud, no subscription.

last night's set · sorting in progress

1 · out

2 · keeper

tl;dr

What this actually is

mess is a big table on your Mac. Drop photos on it and move them around. Pan, zoom, make piles, spread them out. It stays fast with hundreds of full-size photos.

Sort with two keys: keeper or reject. Rejects fade, nothing is deleted. Open a photo full screen, compare two side by side, write a note. Make as many tables as you want.

Extras on top of the table:

create and export Instagram-ready carousels
crop, rotate and frame photos, without touching the originals
line photos up with exact gaps, or spread them evenly
sticky notes
import HEIC straight from the iPhone, and video clips
export the whole table as one image, or copy out your keepers as the original files
archive finished tables to get the disk space back

Plain files on your Mac. No account, no server, no subscription. Made by one photographer for himself, shared with friends, not for sale.

Straight from the app

Not a mockup.

This is FE4, a real club night on a real table. 146 photos, a ten slide carousel, recorded from the app as it runs: Z dives into one photo, Z again pulls back out.

The whole app in one window. Tables, slides and unsorted photos in the sidebar, the mess itself in the middle, Export a click away. More on the showcase page.

∞room to spread the entire shoot out and actually look at it

500+full-res photos on one table; moving one over the pile never hitches

0accounts, servers, subscriptions, or photos leaving your machine

How it works

Dump. Sort.
Then, if you want, post.

No project setup, no import wizard. A huge table, your photos, and room to think with your hands.

Dump everything

Drag the export folder straight out of Finder. Five hundred photos land as a contact sheet, in shooting order. HEIC straight off the iPhone, clips as playable posters. Nothing is organised yet. That's the point.

The canvas holds it all without flinching: panning over the pile is butter, at any zoom, however big the pile gets.

gather the keepers

Gather 6 photos here

Sort the shit out

Walk the shoot full-screen with Space and the arrow keys. 1 out, 2 keeper, 3 undecided. Keepers glow on the table, outs fade to a whisper. Nothing is deleted, nothing is final.

Then play: C compares near-twins side by side, Z drops to true pixels, right-click gathers the scattered keepers into a pile wherever you want them. The sidebar quietly sorts itself while you do.

sorting · 1 out · 2 keeper · 3 undecided

2 · keeper

1 · out

Post, if the table turns into one

This part is optional. Drop fixed-ratio frames over the table and slide photos underneath until the crops read right. Frames are windows, not boxes: the photos stay on the table, the frames just look at them.

When it clicks: ⌘E ships every slide as a 1080px PNG named in order, and your keepers copy out as untouched originals. The chaos stays on the table; the post leaves clean.

post-1 · 3 slides

See all of it, in detail →

Built for exactly one photographer.
Sharpened every week it gets used.

No roadmap, no feature votes, no growth targets. When something feels wrong on a real shoot, it gets fixed that evening. That is how a tool ends up with exactly what the work needs and nothing it doesn't. This page exists so friends can watch it happen.

Make a mess.Sort it out.