overview
Your whole library, as a shelf of photobooks.
The home view lays the entire library out by year and month. Each month is a little photobook spread — two facing pages, hinged at the spine — so you can scan a decade at a glance and feel where the stories are.
The progress band across the top is always honest: how many frames are reviewed, how many cut and kept, what's left, and how much disk you'd reclaim by acting on the cuts.
A library you can hold in your hand, not a folder you dread opening.
discovery
A film strip of forgotten moments.
Across the top of the overview, a 35 mm film strip drifts by — a slow, looping reel of random frames pulled from across the years, sprocket holes and all. Portrait shots sit pillarboxed on the film base, exactly as they would on real stock.
It's not a task list. It's an invitation: hover to pause, and any frame that catches your eye drops you straight into it. Pause, look, fall back in.
- continuous sprocket perforations
- hover-to-pause
- respects reduced-motion
- click any frame to open it
the month photobook
Open a month and it turns like a page.
Tap a month and it opens as a real spread — a hero frame or a mosaic, with a single right-hand page that turns left over the gutter. The selection is diversity-deduped: no two near-identical frames sit side by side, and it re-shuffles fresh on every visit, so the same month never looks the same twice.
Behind the scenes it's a perceptual-hash and timestamp guard picking the most distinct, in-focus frames from the pool — burst duplicates quietly stay out of the spread.
The best of a month, never the same six photos twice.
the week contact sheet
Inside a month, a week is a contact sheet.
Drop into a month and its weeks lay out the way you'd lay strips on a light table — each day a single frame on a film-base sheet, sprockets top and bottom. The label rides the rebate beneath the frame, never across the picture, so nothing covers the photograph you're judging.
One frame per sheet is lit amber — the safelight. It's the day to start with: the one you've already half-culled, or the busiest if you haven't begun. A notch under each frame tracks how far you've gotten. Tap any frame and you're inside that day.
A week at a glance — one frame lit to tell you where to begin.
- one amber safelight / sheet
- labels ride the rebate
- a progress notch per day
- tap a frame to open the day
focus mode
Every frame, with the evidence to judge it.
Open a frame and the photo fills the room — brightest thing on the screen — with a quiet signal panel beside it. EXIF and capture details up top; then library-relative scores with percentile bars: an Apple aesthetic score, a sharpness read from a blur measurement, so you can tell a keeper from a near-miss at a glance.
Below that, content labels and the people in frame. Screenshots and documents are called out with their own tell. People who matter — family, the dogs — carry an amber ring, a standing reminder not to cull them by reflex.
- EXIF & capture
- aesthetic score
- blur / sharpness
- scene labels
- protected people
culling & review
Keep, cut, skip — and change your mind anytime.
Three keys, that's the whole loop. Every decision is recorded, never enacted: a cut is just a mark. The stats bar's cut and kept counts are live links into full review grids, where keepers wear a green edge and cuts a dimmed red one.
Scan a whole decision at once, spot the one you got wrong, and flip it back. Protected frames are guarded — Loupe won't let a reflex cut take out someone who matters.
Reversible by design. The undo is the feature.
how it decides
Smart enough to help. Never enough to overrule you.
◆ Labels nominate
On-device labels — screenshots, documents, burst extras — propose the obvious cuts. They only ever suggest; they never decide.
≡ Score orders
An aesthetic and sharpness score ranks within a pile so you review the weakest first. A low score is never an automatic cut — a quiet candid can score low.
● People protect
Named people guard a frame from any bulk cut. Family, the dogs — Loupe never culls someone who matters by reflex.
the cutting room
It shows its work — and nothing's cut until you say so.
Six rules read the whole library and set aside the frames most likely to go — the soft, the duplicated, the screenshots, the stray clips. Everything's grouped by why it was flagged, and each pile names the exact rule that caught it.
Every pile is honest about where its rule over-reaches — a “watch for” note that points straight at the keepers hiding in the cut, so the saves are easy to spot. Nothing is deleted until you export and your offsite backup is confirmed.
Lead with the truth: nothing here is gone, and nothing's even been cut.
- every pile names its rule
- honest about over-flagging
- nothing cut until you export
- review behind one tap
Frames that came out soft — low sharpness across the whole frame, with a texture guard so deliberately minimal shots aren't swept in.
The also-rans of a burst — every frame except the sharpest in a run of three or more near-identical shots.
people
Everyone in your library, gathered by face.
Loupe finds faces on your own machine and gathers them into people — each a round portrait you can open. Names arrive seeded from your Apple Photos tags, so the people you've already named are known from the first run.
Open someone and Loupe shows their known faces, then quietly proposes more — other frames ranked by how closely they match. Confirm to gather, reject to dismiss. The people who matter wear the same amber ring as in focus mode, so a reflex cut never takes them out.
Find a face, not a folder.
- on-device face detection
- names seeded from Apple
- confirm / reject by similarity
- protected people
- read-only — originals untouched
