Public Beta
A fast, native Mac browser for everything visual you own — pointed straight at your folders, with nothing to import and no library to live inside.
Or, via Homebrew:
brew trust --cask gjeffrey/tap/illigata && brew install --cask gjeffrey/tap/illigata
Free public beta — builds are good for 30 days · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon · Notarized by Apple
They're in folders, on a drive, on a NAS, in a mess — and the app you actually browse them with is Finder, which shows you filenames and small icons and won't play your video. The professional tools answer that by asking you to import your life into a catalogue first, and to keep it there.
Illigata just opens the folder. Point it anywhere and it fills instantly, plays everything macOS can play, and leaves your files exactly where you put them. Fifty files or half a million: the first screen is there at once, the rest streams in behind it, and there is no ceiling.
Turn on Shadow Drive for an external disk and Illigata keeps a small, complete stand-in for it: the same folders, a preview of every picture and clip, your ratings and flags, dimensions, duplicates. Eject the drive and it stays in the sidebar, browsable end to end — so you can find the shot, build the collection, and know exactly which drive to plug back in.
It costs about 35 KB per file at the default size — a drive of fifty thousand pictures fits in under two gigabytes on your Mac — and nothing is written to the drive unless you ask it to carry a copy. Anything you add to a collection gets a stand-in automatically, shadowed drive or not.
Real folders aren't shoots — they're buckets: logos, screenshots, textures, mockups, storyboards, brand assets, client deliverables, a few hundred raws, some footage, and photos mixed in among it all. Everything else is built around photographs, with dates and cameras and rolls.
Illigata doesn't care what kind of image it is. It works out what counts as media by asking macOS rather than matching a list of file extensions, so a format nobody has heard of still gets a thumbnail — and if it can't tell, it shows you the file instead of hiding it.
Rate with ⌘1–5 and the selection moves on by itself. Compare two to four shots side by side, run a rateable slideshow, scrub a video by hovering its thumbnail, or let the machine sort by its own guess at which frames are best.
Ratings and flags are stored as Finder tags, so they show up in Finder and Spotlight, survive this app entirely, and travel with the file. Nothing you decide gets locked in a database only Illigata can read.
Every image is quietly analysed on your own machine — no account, no upload, no telemetry, ever. Ask for “neon sign at night” in natural language and get the picture. Search words that appear inside an image, so a slate, a sign or a screenshot becomes findable.
Find near-duplicates and the resized copies of things you forgot you had. Raw and JPEG versions of one shot group into a single tile, because they're one photograph the camera wrote twice. Pick any image and ask what else looks like it.
Develop raws with a full tone pipeline that never touches the original file. Write IPTC metadata across a whole selection. Spread a collection out on an infinite canvas and arrange it spatially. Export with recipes and hand off to Finder, an app, or a Shortcut.
Every file operation is undoable, including the ones that move things.
It takes about ten seconds to know whether this is better than the window you're using now.
Download IlligataOr, via Homebrew:
brew trust --cask gjeffrey/tap/illigata && brew install --cask gjeffrey/tap/illigata
Free public beta · builds are good for 30 days and update themselves · no account, no telemetry · Questions?