Open a folder, see everything.
A fast, quiet photo viewer for people who keep photos in folders. Go through a shoot in minutes, keep the best, and find any photo by what is in it. Nothing to import, and nothing leaves your Mac.
How it works
Click Open Folder, press ⌘O, or drop a folder on the window. Nothing is imported. Next time, home picks up at the photo you stopped on.
Arrow keys, a swipe or the scroll wheel. Press P to pick, X to reject, 1 to 5 for stars. Your originals are never touched.
Type what you remember: “people on a beach”, a word on a sign, a city or a month. Smart search finds it across every folder, on your Mac.
What it does best
Pick with P, reject with X, star with 1 to 5, colour with 6 to 9, all from the keyboard. Rejects fade in the grid, filters show just the picks, and one click moves the rejects to the Trash or copies the picks to a folder. Marks are saved as XMP beside each photo, so Lightroom, Capture One and Bridge see them too.
Lumen groups bursts taken moments apart and spots the same photo saved twice, even as a HEIC or a smaller copy. Press S to go through them: keep one and the rest are rejected, or send extra copies to the Trash. Nothing is deleted or chosen for you.
Put two photos side by side and zoom or drag either one: the other follows to the same spot, so you can tell which is sharper. Shutter speed and aperture sit on each. Space brings in the next shot of the burst.
The sidebar shows your folders as a tree that opens to where you are, with the path above to step back up. A folder of folders shows every photo inside, grouped by folder. Photos you add or change in Finder show up right away.
And also
JPEG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, PSD and RAW (DNG, CR2, NEF, ARW, RAF). No plugins.
Pick a format, quality and size for a whole selection. Remove metadata leaves out dates and GPS.
Exposure, Contrast and Saturation, or Auto, then Export Edited Copy. Your original is never overwritten.
Free, Original, 1:1, 4:5, 3:2 or 16:9, straighten up to 15°, then Save Copy.
Press Space for a slideshow with a gentle pan and zoom. Press T to show just the photo on a TV or second screen.
Camera settings, a histogram and a small map when the photo has a location.
Right-click and choose Select Text in Photo to copy words from it.
Press ? for the full list of keys and gestures.
Price
Private by design
Smart search runs on an on-device model and Similar shots on Apple's on-device frameworks. The index stays on your Mac and nothing is uploaded.
No sign-up, no analytics, no ads and no tracking. We collect nothing.
Lumen notices that people are in a photo, but never works out who anyone is.
Lumen never writes into a photo. Marks go in a small .xmp file beside it, and files only change when you ask.
Questions
Every feature is free for 7 days, with as many folders as you like. After that, Lumen Pro is $9.99 once to keep opening folders, with no subscription. A photo opened from Finder always shows, with or without Pro.
Stars, rejects and colour labels are saved in standard XMP files next to your photos. Lightroom reads them for RAW files, and Capture One and Bridge read them for every format. Picks are kept in Lumen's own field, since XMP has no standard for them.
Never on its own. It never writes into a photo, and similar shots are only gathered for you to decide. Photos go to the macOS Trash only when you choose Move to Trash, and Undo brings them back.
No. Reading, smart search and grouping happen on your Mac, and place names come from a city list inside the app. Lumen goes online only to download the smart search model once (the request carries nothing about you or your photos), for the App Store to check your purchase, and for Apple Maps to draw the map in the info panel.
Any Mac with Apple silicon on macOS 14 or later. Smart search is a one-time 656 MB download of an on-device model; without it, Search uses the subjects it recognises, text in photos, places, dates and names.
Free for 7 days, then $9.99 once. For Mac.
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