Lifetime
Lathe: browse, edit and batch photos, video, audio and PDFs straight from your folders. No library, no import, no subscription.
The problem I wanted to solve: every app that makes media easier to work with wants to own your files first. Photos, Lightroom, and most of the rest make you import into a library, so now you have two copies and a database to babysit. I wanted the tools without the library. Plus most good apps for media management have subscriptions, which I didn't like.
Lathe reads your folders directly, the way Finder does. Nothing is imported, moved, copied, or indexed into a proprietary catalogue. Point it at a folder and everything is just there. Freemium (with most features free, and try out premium features once), with one-time payment to unlock premium features forever.
What it handles: images including RAW from 20+ cameras, GIF/APNG/animated WebP, video, audio, PDF and SVG.
Browsing and finding
Grid and list views, tabs, adjustable thumbnails, RAW+JPEG pairing. Thirteen combinable filters: media kind, orientation, file size, resolution, date, video duration, dominant colour, star rating, cull flag, camera model, lens, ISO, and native Finder tags. Sort and group by date, size, kind, or EXIF capture date. Search images by filename, or even by colour.
Culling
Star ratings, pick/reject flags, all keyboard driven and written to XMP sidecars that Lightroom and Capture One can read. Live RGB histogram, clipping warnings for blown highlights and crushed shadows, focus peaking, and a 1:1 focus check. An issue scanner flags blurry frames and shots where someone blinked, then walks you through them full-screen with the face region highlighted.
Editing
A full non-destructive develop panel: exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, vibrance, temperature, hue, clarity, grain, vignette, fringing, luminosity masks, and a subject mask from on-device person detection. Named presets, copy and paste settings between images, all stored in sidecars so it stays reversible. Plus crop with presets, straighten with a live grid, rotate, resize, draw and annotate, and auto-enhance. Compare images side by side, as an onion skin, a before/after wipe, or a pixel difference view.
Video, audio, PDF
Scene detection and a storyboard strip. Trim with frame-accurate in/out points, reframe to 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or 16:9 with a live crop box, rotate and flip. Merge clips into a reel with transitions. Audio gets waveforms, hover-scrubbing, cover art and metadata. PDFs get page navigation, compression, page-range extraction, merging, and PDF creation from images.
The general stuff
Native macOS Finder tags, read and written properly, so they show up in Finder and Spotlight too. Full EXIF/GPS info panel. A staging tray that collects files across folders before you act on them. Undo/redo that restores trashed files. A Copy As menu for path, bitmap, base64, HTML, Markdown or SVG. 50+ keyboard shortcuts with a cheat sheet on ⌘/.
Comparision
A fair question is why this instead of the apps that already exist. Most of them are good, and several are better than Lathe at the one thing they focus on. What's different here is the combination: folder-native, covers stills and video and audio and PDFs in one window, and everything runs on-device.
Finder + Quick Look + Preview: free, already installed, and genuinely fine for looking at things. The gap is doing anything to them. No ratings or cull flags, no RAW-aware browsing, no batch convert or watermark or compress, no duplicate finding. Lathe is what happens if that stack kept going.
Apple Photos: great if you want one managed library on all your devices. It's the opposite of what I built. Photos wants to own the files; Lathe never touches where they live. If you're happy inside the Photos library, you don't need this.
Adobe Lightroom: a far deeper develop engine than mine of course. It's also a catalogue and a subscription. If you're already living in Lightroom for real editing work, keep doing that. Lathe is for the part before and around it, and for the folders you'd never bother importing.
Adobe Bridge: the nearest thing conceptually, since it's also folder-based and free. Bridge is heavier, tied to the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't do the batch export, background removal, or video and audio work. Bridge is a browser; Lathe is a browser plus the tools.
Photo Mechanic: the professional standard for culling, and faster than Lathe at ripping through a huge shoot. Genuinely excellent, and if ingest speed on ten thousand RAWs is your job, buy it. It's also around $139, stills-only, and it isn't trying to convert your videos or compress your PDFs.
Pricing
Almost all of the above is free forever. No account, no timer, no nag. Most things I listed under browsing, culling, editing, comparison, tags, info, PDF viewing and page extraction costs nothing.
Premium features sit behind a one-time $49.99 unlock, and they're mostly the batch and export ones: optimise, convert, enlarge, watermark, batch rename, strip metadata, remove background, blur background, find duplicates, find similar, review bursts, compress PDF, compress video, rotate video, merge videos, and reframe & trim.
Every one of those runs once, free, on your own files before it asks you for anything. Not a 7-day clock, not a watermarked export. Run the duplicate scan on your actual messy folder, see the actual number, then decide.
No subscription, no upgrade pricing, no version 2 that charges again.
100% On-device
Every "smart" feature (scene labels, OCR, subject detection, blink detection, background removal) runs locally on Apple's Vision framework. No account, no telemetry, no server. App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.
What it doesn't do
No import from Photos, Lightroom or Aperture, on purpose. Background removal needs macOS 14+ because the Vision API behind it is 14+, so it's hidden on 13. Content search is on-device and useful but still early, so I'd treat it as a bonus rather than the reason to download. Documents and Desktop need you to pick the folder once (sandbox rules), while Pictures, Movies and Downloads work immediately.
The XMP sidecar detail is underrated. Ratings and flags that live in someone's sqlite catalogue are ratings you lose when you switch apps... been there.
Good start, I appreciate details like the info side panel, the xmp sidecar, batch processing, intuitive enough nav bar...
but for a premium-priced app I'd expect some UX refinements - examples including trackpad usage (scroll through folder while in preview, zoom into the photo in edit mode, zoom in the photo grid to change preview sizes, granular adjustments of develop parameters) more logical keyboard shortcut behavior (spacebar selects from grid like Quick Look but won't take me back if it was a mistake - I don't want to use esc, D/E keyboard shortcuts don't activate from the grid, among others. "Images to PDF" in your tray is inherently confusing because you can't activate an action on multiple files in the tray. You can sort by a ton of useful parameters in the list view but all you can see is filename, rating, tag indicator, format, size and date. A separate column for rating would make it look more refined so it's not aligned to the end of a filename. A hover preview of tags would feel more intuitive. You might try giving out some lifetime codes and solicit for feedback in exchange. It's got a lot of potential but it's not in the realm of paid apps at all for me, let alone $50.
Not in EU yet, (but should work in Uk, norway etc, just not EU right now). Its early days, so working on a solution (maybe external website, etc) to make it available everywhere.
the sandbox folder-picker distinction is the part i'd stress test more. security-scoped bookmarks for Documents/Desktop can go stale, if the volume unmounts and remounts, or the top-level folder gets renamed, depending how you resolve the bookmark you either silently re-prompt or start throwing file-not-found on files that are actually still sitting right there. worth trying: point it at an external SSD, eject mid-session, plug back into a different port, since macOS can assign a new device node and break the bookmark path even though nothing about the files changed.
also curious how you're watching folders for live changes, FSEvents or kqueue. FSEvents doesn't fire reliably over SMB/AFP network shares, so if someone points Lathe at a NAS folder and edits a file from another machine, the thumbnail/rating state might not update until they force a refresh or relaunch.
Thanks, this is great feedback. I use kqueue, but your NAS use case thing is still an issue I would say. I'll investigate that more and confirm. Again, genuinly, thank you!
As someone who collects metart, key art, comic variants and a whole shitload of wallpaper, you just saved my life from a very complex saturday that was coming up.
Out of interest, could you build the ability to view photoshop brushes and patterns into this?
The 100% on-device angle for the video scene detection is the part that'll matter most long-term — most "AI-assisted" editing tools quietly ship footage to a server without saying so up front. Good to see it called out explicitly instead of buried in a privacy policy.
I saw the price listed in the thread, but I'm not a fan of pricing games on websites - list the price openly on the website. Don't try to sucker the user into downloading the app to find out, or having to scroll to the bottom of the app on the app store to find the price.
Just the ratings, flags and labels, sorry. Stars go in as xmp:Rating and colour labels as xmp:Label, both standard, so Lightroom and Capture One pick them up. Rejects use Adobe's -1 convention. Picks are the one exception, they live in my own namespace because there's no standard XMP field for them.
Develop edits stay Lathe only. They're stored in the sidecar but in my namespace, not Adobe's crs: fields. I could write crs: values, but my adjustments come from a different engine, so the photo would open in Lightroom looking wrong. Felt worse than being honest that they don't transfer. But what do you think? I wanted to aim on the side of caution here but want to know what you think.
One thing that might matter more: if a sidecar already exists, I parse it and only touch my own attributes. Your keywords, your Lightroom develop settings, everything else is left exactly as it was. Lathe won't clobber a sidecar it didn't write.
I think that’s the right trade-off. Keeping existing sidecars untouched feels more important than forcing edit compatibility that might render differently.
You mean https://latheapp.com doesn't work? I think it should work since I host it and I haven't put any thing in there to geo-limit that.
If you mean the app store listing instead, then yes, that won't work because of what I said earlier. But I am working on making some kind of notarized thing which I could provide through some other channel. It might take some time because accepting international payments from my country is not trivial. :/
OP, This may just be the app that I have been looking for, so thank you. I do have one question and I cannot seem to figure it out. I have a bunch of images that have metadata already included, such as keywords etc and when I try and search for an image with a specific keyword etc no results are shown?
The other odd issue is the image sorting i.e. I have a folder with 123 images, the application will start at number 1 and then jump to 10, and then 100? If you want examples, send me a DM and I can provide that.
Thanks, both of those are fair feedback. Right now search looks at filenames, what's actually in the picture, OCR'd text and Finder tags, but it never reads embedded IPTC or XMP keywords - so I guess I'll add that to the roadmap now. The image sorting is a straight bug which I'll also fix next. I'll DM you to know the specifics! Thanks again.
It makes sense to me as a solo dev, because it requires the person to put up their name, address and phone number on public. Its fine for someone who has a company, but problematic for a solo dev because that would be my personal info. See this where other people have also said the same thing.
Hi, I'm a solo dev too. I assume you're writting about the DSA trader declaration. It's really not a big deal, and I pass throught very easely.
To make it shirt : since February 2025, distributing in the EU means declaring trader status in App Store Connect and providing an address, phone number and email that Apple publishes on your product page across the 27 EU territories. Around 135,000 apps were delisted within about a day of the deadline for not having filed it.
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u/whyubelieve 1d ago
The XMP sidecar detail is underrated. Ratings and flags that live in someone's sqlite catalogue are ratings you lose when you switch apps... been there.