A big fast table for your photos
Drop a whole shoot on it, push the pictures around, make piles, keep the good ones. Built by a photographer, for himself.
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 out. Outs fade, nothing is deleted. Open a photo full screen, compare two side by side, write a note. Make as many tables as you want.
Plain files on your Mac. No account, no server, no subscription.
Extras on top of the table
- Create and export Instagram-ready carousels
- Crop and rotate photos, without touching the originals
- Put a photo in a coloured frame, in colours picked from the photo itself
- 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
- Demo mode: the camera hops photo to photo on its own, full screen, for showing a table to someone
- Press I on any photo for its camera, lens and exposure, read from the file itself
Built around one job
Moving a photo over a pile of hundreds must never stutter. That is where the engineering went. The rest is a short list of tools that sit on the table.
Push one photo across 500 others
The table is drawn by your Mac's graphics card, so it moves like paper on a desk, not like a website. Fling the view, dive into a frame, pull back out. Nothing stutters.
Sort at the speed of doubt
1 out, 2 keeper, 3 not sure, next photo. Keepers glow, outs fade to a whisper but stay on the table, because sorting is not deleting. Change your mind whenever.
Frames are windows, not boxes
Lay Instagram-ratio frames over the pile and slide photos underneath until each crop reads right. ⌘E ships every slide as a numbered 1080px PNG, drawn from the originals.
You work on copies
Importing copies each photo into the vault; the table shows previews of it. Crop it, frame it, reject it: the original is never touched, and exports hand it back byte for byte.
Plain files on your own disk
Tables are readable JSON, photos are ordinary files, everything lives in ~/Documents. No account, no cloud, nothing that stops working when a company does.
Real tables
Straight out of the working vault. No staging, no sample content.
One table, whole story
A club night start to finish: the raw pile sorted and dimmed at the left, contenders enlarged for a closer look, and the ten-slide carousel taking shape through the middle. Nothing left the table; it just found its place.
Zoom out to think, dive in to look
A studio shoot mid-sort: 128 photos, 113 already faded out, the gathered keeper pile at the bottom. Press Z and the camera flies to the selection; press it again and you are back over the whole table.
A finished carousel, exactly as it exports
Ten fixed-ratio slides composed over the pile. The contact sheet is still visible behind slide five, because the mess stays until you are done with it.
Gather here
Right-click an empty spot and the scattered keepers fly into a tidy pile, still selected, ready to drag onward. One undo puts them back where they were.
Demo mode
Press D and the interface steps aside: the camera hops from photo to photo on its own, lifting off as it travels and diving back down. For showing a table to someone without touching anything.
Keyboard first
Press ? in the app for the same sheet. The full map is on the features page.
Navigate
Sorting
Create & arrange
Tables & files
No account, no cloud, no price
Built by one photographer for his own shoots. Nothing leaves your machine, and there is nothing to subscribe to. If you want the notes on what changed each week, leave an address.
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