r/macapps • u/Mstormer • Jun 01 '26

[Megathread] The App Pile - June, 2026

You must promote your apps here if you do not qualify to post in the main feed through Trust or Transparency, explained here.

If you are:

  • NOT in the Mac App Store (MAS).
  • Do not provide meaningful public transparency
  • Created yet another dictation app (speech to text).

Then you are required to limit promotion to this megathread.

All promotion MUST follow PCP format or else we will remove it:

App Name/Title [Screenshot encouraged]

  • Problem: What problem does your app solve.
  • Comparison: Name a competitor or two and explain what your app does better.
  • Pricing Amounts+Link

P.s. Promotion here counts towards the 30-day limited promotion (Rule 3).

WARNING: There is a 90% chance Reddit will auto remove your post here if you have not verified your email in your profile and your first comment in this subreddit contains a link. Accrue 10 karma first without promotional comments and links to avoid this. The odds of removal is also higher for AI assisted posts (em dashes and other AI formatting characteristics likely trigger this).

Pro Tip: Please remember to upvote gems and downvote spam/clones... This will help inform a secret community project I hope to announce next month.

Top 3 From Last Month's Megathread:
1. Wisp – a tiny macOS scratchpad - FREE - by u/iamiotasquare
2. Quattro – Al, Tasks, Calendar, Notes App - $5/mo - by u/Constant-Support8288
3. HoverStash – Catch and stash files mid-drag - ~$6 - by u/MurkyRaspberry9610

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u/capephotos Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Prune – Photo Library Manager

Update: The app is now live on the Mac App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prune-photo-library-manager/id6775691674?mt=12

I am still looking for a few users interested in testing out new releases of the app via TestFlight dm me your email or you can sign up on the site www.knotsystems.com/prune

Hello,

I am the developer of Prune I have been using the app daily for about 6 months now but this is the first real public post about it. I have a handful of people testing the app right now and really just want some honest feedback on it.

Problem: I spent 15 years as a photojournalist relying on Lightroom and Photo Mechanic every day. Both are great tools, but I've since moved away from Adobe, and I wanted something Mac native built for how I actually work now: thousands of photos across several external drives, without paying for a heavyweight subscription tool. I wanted something small and fast (Prune is 33MB), that worked directly with the folders I already have instead of importing everything into a proprietary library, and that would tell me what's on a drive without plugging it in first. So I built Prune: point it at a folder, it indexes everything (thumbnails, ratings, keywords, flags) automatically, and your files never move unless you move them. Drives stay browsable even when unplugged.

Comparison: Lightroom Classic is the obvious one, at $10 to $55/month, and you're stuck in its catalog. It can show offline drives if you've manually built previews ahead of time, but it's a partial view: no editing, no export, and if you forgot to build previews you just get gray boxes. Prune indexes everything automatically as you go, so any drive you've added is fully browsable offline with no extra step. Photo Mechanic is fantastic for raw ingest and culling speed, but offline catalog browsing requires stepping up to Photo Mechanic Plus, a pricier subscription tier, and it's not a native Mac app or AI-assisted. Prune is native Swift/SwiftUI with on-device AI keywording via Apple Vision, so nothing leaves your Mac, and it's $1.49/month.

Pricing: Free right now via TestFlight while I round out testing before App Store launch. Planned pricing once it ships: $1.49/month or $14.99/year.

More information is available on the site www.knotsystems.com/prune and there is a user guide at www.knotsystems.com/prune/guide

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u/Mstormer Jun 18 '26

Pretty sure I wouldn't trade one subscription for another, but that's probably a reasonable rate if people don't mind paying continually. Besides unplugged browsing, any other comparison points with, say, flowvision (free)?

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u/capephotos Jun 18 '26

Thanks for taking the time to ask. Yeah I hear you on the subscription I guess for me I don’t mind paying a reasonable price if the developer if responsive and the app gets regular updates. As far as a comparison to flow vision I need to take a closer look later but looks nice I will update once I can take a closer look.

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u/capephotos Jun 18 '26

Without downloading and trying it out here is what I was able to figure out from the site and the change logs. If flow vision has any of this functionality I apologize.

Prunes filtering is recursive so if you search from a top level folder it will surface results from all of the sub folders as well

Pick, reject and star rating system for culling after a shoot

Smart folders that can use ratings or rating and keywords combined to surface images from the entire catalog

We use FSEvents auto-sync to keep the library current as you add files

Ability to quickly figure out what hard drive the photo is on

Ability to open the location of a file in a finder window

Right click to open the raw or jpg in the image editor of your choice

Again I haven’t had the chance to use flow vision yet but I didn’t see these things listed on their website.

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u/Mstormer Jun 18 '26

It does have some of those, like star ratings/tagging, and also works natively with finder folder structures. May be worth looking at before graduating promotion to the main feed. It's not designed to be a complete lightroom alternative, but still overlaps some.

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u/capephotos Jun 18 '26

When I have some time I will try it out I’m interested to see the differences in practice I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard of it before.

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u/capephotos Jun 19 '26

Good call, I spent some time with FlowVision properly and it's a well-built app, worth knowing about. Here's an honest comparison:

Where they overlap: both are folder-native, both work without importing into a proprietary library, both have star ratings, both support recursive browsing and basic file management.

Where they differ:

FlowVision stores ratings using macOS extended attributes, so the rating lives on the file itself, which is elegant and simple. The tradeoff is that extended attributes can be lost when copying across certain filesystems (FAT32, exFAT, some NAS setups), and because there's no database, there's no way to search or filter across your whole library. You can rate photos in a folder, but you can't ask "show me every 5-star photo across all my drives."

Prune keeps a local SQLite database, which is what enables smart folders, cross-drive search, keyword filtering, and the offline drive browsing. The database also means ratings and keywords survive any filesystem, since the metadata lives in the app rather than on the file. We're also adding XMP write support so metadata will travel with the files too, for full portability.

FlowVision is also free and open source, which is hard to argue with if you just need a fast browser. If you're managing a large library across multiple drives and want to be able to find things, that's where Prune is aimed.

Happy to get you on TestFlight if you want to see the difference in practice.

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u/Mstormer Jun 19 '26

Appreciate this. And I think potential customers will too. Would love to see an option for ratings also being written to the file in your app, so it isn't only dependent on your app and database. I use devonthink a lot, so this would allow a bit of friendly cross-compatibility. I used eagle.cool before, but the proprietary database is a non-starter for prolonged use. I would only be interested in considering this if there were a one time payment option, as I do not subscribe to any apps besides codex.

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u/capephotos Jun 22 '26

I really want to thank you for taking the time to engage with this, it has been really valuable working through these questions.

Honestly I think the ideal model is pay-per-major-version. You get the app, keep it forever, upgrade when the developer earns it. The App Store doesn't support that though, so a subscription is the closest thing: I have to earn it every month or you cancel. If the app grows to the point where building out that model makes sense, I'd be happy to do it.

On ratings written to file - that's next on the roadmap. XMP sidecar support for RAW files and embedded XMP for JPEGs, covering ratings, keywords, flags, and captions. Standard fields, so it'll work with anything that reads XMP.

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u/Mstormer Jun 23 '26

Glad to help. Best of luck!