Getting started
What Muse is
Muse is a local-first viewer and organizer for the folders you already have. Point it at a folder — Downloads, Documents, a shoot you copied off a card — and browse everything in one place.
Nothing is imported or copied. Muse reads your files where they live. It never moves them, never renames them, and never writes over them. Photo editing is non-destructive: adjustments are stored as instructions in Muse's own database, and the original file on disk is untouched.
It is built for people with photographs — RAW, HDR, an editor, a library that organizes itself — but it is not photo-only. It will happily browse a folder of PDFs, videos, fonts, or code.
Adding folders
Click + Folder at the bottom of the sidebar and pick any folder on disk. Muse indexes it in the background — the status pills at the bottom of the sidebar show progress — and you can start browsing immediately.
Add as many as you like. Drag folders up and down in the sidebar to reorder them. A folder buried several levels deep can be pinned to the top of the sidebar so you don't have to walk the tree to it every time.
Removing a folder from the sidebar doesn't delete anything on disk. Its index data is kept for 180 days, so re-adding it restores your tags, ratings and collections instantly, then it's cleaned up automatically.
The grid
The grid is the main view. It packs your files into balanced columns at whatever density you choose, and only ever renders what's actually on screen — a folder with thousands of images scrolls as smoothly as one with ten.
Click a tile to select it. ⌘-click adds to the selection, ⇧-click extends it, and clicking the empty space between tiles clears it. Right-click a selection for the actions that apply to it. Drag a selection onto a folder in the sidebar to move those files there.
The slider at the bottom right sets tile size and spacing. Fn with the arrow keys pages up and down.
A tile opens on double-click, not a single click. A single click selects.
Opening a file
Double-click any tile to open it full-screen in the viewer. Photos, RAW files, PDFs, video, audio, fonts, Markdown, code and plain text all open in place. Anything without a dedicated viewer falls back to Quick Look.
To open a file in another app instead, use File ▸ Open With or the same item in the right-click menu. Muse will hand the file to whichever app you pick.
If the photo carries edits you made in Muse, Open With asks first: Edit Original hands over the untouched file on disk, Edit a Copy renders your edits into a new file and hands that over instead. It never silently gives another app a file that looks different from what you see in Muse.
Your library
Folders and subfolders
The sidebar mirrors what's actually on disk. Expand a folder to walk into its subfolders. A toolbar toggle controls whether the grid shows just the current folder or everything beneath it.
Right-click a folder for the things you can do to it: make a new subfolder, rename it, reveal it in Finder, pin it, or — for a top-level folder — remove it from Muse.
Renaming a folder in Muse renames it on disk, and Muse carries every tag, rating, note and collection membership across to the new path. Nothing is orphaned.
Moving and deleting
Drag a selection onto a folder in the sidebar to move those files there, or right-click and choose a destination. Moving a file on disk keeps everything Muse knows about it.
Muse never deletes a file. Delete moves it to the Trash, where macOS's own Put Back can undo it, and Muse shows an undo of its own straight after.
Two identical copies of a photo in two different folders are two separate files, and Muse treats them that way. Each has its own tags, its own rating, and its own edits. Editing one leaves the other alone.
Analysis
After a folder is indexed, Muse analyzes new or changed images using Apple's on-device Vision framework. It works out descriptive tags, the dominant colors, the dimensions, and any readable text in the image.
That single pass is what powers the tag chips, the Color and Shape sorts, the color swatches in the viewer, automatic collections, and searching for words that appear inside a photo.
There's no button to press. It runs in the background, only on files it hasn't already done, and it never redoes work. You can watch progress and pause it in Settings.
Your own tag edits always beat the machine's. Re-analysis can never undo a tag you added or removed yourself — which is what makes running it automatically safe.
Ratings
Rate anything one to five stars, or clear the rating. Ratings show on grid tiles (if you turn that on in Settings), inside collections, and in the viewer, and they can be searched, sorted and used as a smart-collection rule.
Star ratings already written into your files by Lightroom, Bridge or Capture One can be brought in — see Import. A rating you set in Muse is never overwritten by an import.
Tags
The chip row above the grid shows the tags present in the folder you're looking at. Click a chip to filter down to it; hover for its count. Active filters appear in a bar beneath the chips and can be cleared one at a time or all at once.
To tag something, select it and choose New Tag… from the right-click menu. The field completes against tags you already use — so you pick the tag you have instead of creating a near-duplicate of it — and it suggests tags from images that look like this one. Your most-used tags sit right in that menu. The viewer's Tags card does the same job.
Right-click a chip to rename or delete that tag everywhere.
A tag belongs to a file in a particular folder. The same photo copied into a second folder has its own tags there, and deleting a tag in one folder never reaches into another.
Notes
Every photo can carry a note — a caption, a client name, a reminder of where it was taken. Write it in the Note card in the viewer. Notes are searchable along with names, tags and text found inside images.
Notes are stored in Muse's database, not written into the file. Your original is never modified.
Collections
Collections are groupings that span your whole library, regardless of which folder a file lives in. Some are suggested automatically from what analysis finds; the rest you build yourself. Screenshots get their own collections by what they're of — recipes, receipts, places, articles.
Open the Collections page from the toolbar to browse them all, or turn on the sidebar section in Settings to keep them alongside your folders. Open one to rename or delete it from its header, or set a cover image.
Right-click a collection in the sidebar and choose Change Symbol & Color… to give it its own icon — either a symbol with a color, or an emoji.
Collections track your files. Delete images or remove a folder and the collections that referenced them shrink to match; ones left with nothing in them disappear.
Smart collections
A smart collection is a set of rules rather than a fixed list. Membership is worked out live, so anything matching the rules appears in it automatically — including files you add next week.
Match all the rules or any of them. The rules available are:
- Rating — at least, exactly, or at most a number of stars
- Color — a named swatch or a hex value
- Tag — has, or does not have, a given tag
- Kind — image, RAW, PDF, video, audio or document
- Date — created or modified, within the last N days, before, or after
- Filename — contains some text
- Size — at least, exactly, or at most a file size
- Location — a place name, or within a radius of a point
- Similar to — visually like a photo you pick
Viewing
The viewer
Double-click a photo and it flies out of the grid into a full-screen view, with the background tinted from the photo's own colors. Cards down the side carry its information: metadata, tags, colors, a note, star rating.
The viewer has two modes — Preview and Edit — sharing the same canvas and chrome. Preview is for looking; Edit is the full non-destructive editor. Switch between them at the top.
Page between photos with the arrows or the pager. ⌘U hides every control so nothing but the photograph is on screen, and shows them again.
Zoom, pan and info
Pinch or scroll to zoom, drag to pan. This works the same in both Preview and Edit, so you can zoom in to check focus while you're adjusting a photo.
The info card reads out what the file itself records — when it was taken, the camera and lens, ISO, aperture, shutter, dimensions, file size — and the color card shows the dominant colors analysis extracted, which you can click to search for other photos in that range.
The Share button in the viewer offers AirDrop, Mail, Messages and Save to Files, plus Open With.
File formats
Muse recognises and renders:
- Images — JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, GIF and the rest of what macOS decodes
- RAW — camera raw files, including HDR gain maps
- PSD, SVG, PDF
- Video and audio
- Text, Markdown, code, office documents
- Fonts, 3D models, archives
Anything else falls back to Quick Look, so it still previews.
Muse identifies a file by its extension first, then by asking macOS, then by reading the first few bytes. That last step means a photo whose extension got truncated or mangled — a long filename that lost its .jpg, a .jpg_large from a download — still shows up as the photograph it is.
A few uncommon formats won't preview, or won't appear on a shared web page. That depends on what Apple and Google can render, not on Muse.
Grid layouts
Three layouts, from the Image Layout control in the toolbar:
- Columns — vertical columns, each photo keeping its own proportions
- Rows — horizontal rows of matched height
- Grid — a uniform square grid
The slider at the bottom right sets density and spacing. Settings can add file names beneath tiles, show star ratings on them, and set how rounded the corners are — a rounding that carries into the viewer, so a photo keeps its shape when you open it.
Background and appearance
The palette button in the toolbar sets the background behind your images: Light, Dark, Auto (light by day, dark at night), or a Custom color of your choosing. The toolbar icons recolor to stay legible against whatever you pick.
Finding things
Search
The search field sits at the far right of the toolbar. It searches file names, tags, notes, and text that analysis read inside your images — so a screenshot of a receipt is findable by what the receipt says.
The magnifier menu scopes the search to the current folder or your whole library.
Muse can also offer an on-device model that understands what a photo looks like, so you can search for things nobody ever typed — "person on a beach at sunset". It downloads only if you accept the offer, and it runs entirely on your Mac.
On a narrow window the search field collapses to a magnifier icon; click it to expand.
Search tokens
Type key:value to narrow a search by something specific. Tokens combine, and anything that isn't a recognised token is searched as ordinary text. Autocomplete offers the keys as you type.
| camera: | the camera body that took it |
| lens: | the lens |
| iso: | ISO — a number, or a range |
| f: | aperture — a number, or a range |
| in: | a year, or a year and month |
| near: | a place name |
| text: | words appearing inside the image |
| color: | a color name or hex value |
| star: | a rating, as a minimum |
| kind: | image, raw, pdf, video, audio or document |
| faces: | how many faces are in it |
| pets: | how many pets are in it |
| is: | a quality — portrait, group photo |
A value with spaces goes in quotes: near:"San Francisco". A bare run of stars — ★★★★ — works as a rating filter with no key at all.
similar: exists too, but you don't type it. Right-click a photo and choose Find Similar Photos and Muse writes the token into the search field for you, where you can remove it like any other.
Color search
Search by color and Muse matches perceptually, not by exact value — it compares colors the way an eye judges them, so searching for a particular blue finds the photographs that read as that blue rather than only the ones with that precise hex in them.
Give it a color name or a hex value with color:, or click a swatch on the color card in the viewer to find more like it.
Sorting and filtering
Sort by date, name, size, color or shape. The arrow beside the sort menu sets the direction, and it spells out what that means for whatever you're sorting by — newest or oldest first, largest or smallest, A→Z or Z→A — rather than leaving you to guess which way "ascending" points.
The filter control narrows the grid to a kind of file, to rated items, or to files with XMP sidecars beside them. Tag chips filter on top of that, and the tag sort control orders the chips themselves.
Duplicates
Find Duplicates surfaces three kinds of copy in the current folder: files that are byte-for-byte identical, images that merely look the same, and files that share a name. Each group is shown as tiles so you can see what you're deciding about.
Select what you don't want and clear it out to the Trash.
Muse will not let you delete every file in a group. One is always marked KEEP — the point of the tool is to remove the copies, not the photograph.
Editing
The editor
Open a photo and switch to Edit. Everything you do is non-destructive: Muse stores your adjustments as a list of instructions and re-renders from the original every time. The file on disk is never written to.
Editing is for photographs — images and RAW files. Anything else (a PSD, a video, a document) opens in another app through Open With instead.
You can also go straight into the editor without stopping at Preview: right-click a photo in the grid and choose Edit.
An edited photo carries a small blue badge in the grid, so you can tell at a glance what you've worked on.
Adjustments
The editor's cards cover:
- Tone — exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, plus an auto-tone that reads the photo and sets them for you
- Color — white balance (with an eyedropper), tint, vibrance, saturation
- Presence — clarity, texture, dehaze, sharpening
- Curve — see Curves and tone zones
- Geometry — see Crop and straighten
- Vignette
- HSL / Color Mix — hue, saturation and luminance per color band
- Split toning — separate color casts for highlights and shadows
- Grain
- LUT — see Styles and LUTs
Copy the whole set of adjustments from one photo and paste it onto another, or onto a whole selection in the grid.
Crop and straighten
Drag the crop frame, or pick an aspect ratio preset and lock to it. Straighten by angle, rotate in quarter turns, and flip horizontally or vertically. Like every other adjustment, all of it is reversible — the pixels outside the crop are still there.
Closing the editor straight after a crop flies the uncropped photo back to the grid, and it settles into its cropped shape on landing. That's expected.
Curves and tone zones
The curve editor gives you the usual point curve for precise control over how input tones map to output.
The tone-zone control is a plainer way at the same thing: the tonal range is divided into zones, and you push a zone brighter or darker without touching its neighbours. Turn on the zone overlay and Muse paints the photo by zone, so you can see exactly which parts of the image a slider is going to move before you move it.
Histogram and clipping
The histogram updates live as you work. Beneath it, Muse says in plain English what's actually happening — which end is clipping, how much of the frame it affects, and whether it matters — instead of leaving you to interpret a shape.
Zebras stripe the areas that are blown out or crushed directly on the photo. There's also a readout that explains, deterministically, why the image looks the way it does given the adjustments you've applied.
For HDR photographs with gain maps, the histogram and the clipping warnings account for the extra headroom rather than treating it as blown.
Styles and LUTs
The Styles browser shows looks as live thumbnails of your photo, not a generic sample, so you're choosing by what it does to this image. Original is always first, and Muse marks which style is currently applied.
Save your own adjustments as a preset to reuse. Import .cube LUT files and they appear alongside the built-in styles.
Lightroom presets can be imported too — see Import.
Versions and snapshots
Take a snapshot at any point and come back to it later — a black-and-white treatment beside a color one, a tighter crop beside the full frame. Snapshots are listed in the editor and switching between them is instant, because nothing was ever rendered to disk.
Before-and-after and side-by-side comparison both work against the current state, so you can check your work without leaving the editor.
Editor workspace
The editor's cards are yours to arrange. Hide the ones you don't use, and drag the rest into the order you want — within a column or across to the other one. Empty one column entirely and the editor becomes a single-column layout; there's no separate mode to switch to.
Reset it whenever you want.
Compare
Select two photos and compare them side by side at full size, with focus peaking to show you which one is actually sharp. This is how you choose between two frames of the same moment.
In and out
Import
Import brings information into Muse. It does not copy or move your photographs — they stay exactly where they are. There are five sources:
- Metadata & Lightroom Edits… — reads the keywords, star ratings, color labels and Lightroom adjustments already written into your files and XMP sidecars, and turns them into Muse tags, ratings and edits
- Lightroom Presets… — brings your presets across as Muse styles
- From Apple Photos…
- From Google Takeout…
- From Eagle Library…
Color labels can be mapped onto whatever you want them to mean in Muse before the import runs. You get a report at the end saying what came in.
Your files are only ever read during an import, never modified. A rating or tag you set in Muse is never overwritten by one coming in.
Export
Export writes new files with your edits rendered in. Formats:
- Same as original — an unedited photo is copied byte-for-byte
- JPEG, HEIC, WebP — with a quality setting
- PNG, TIFF — 8-bit or 16-bit
Resize by dimensions or long edge, with a never-upscale guard. Choose whether EXIF and location data ride along. There's a live estimate of the output size as you change the settings.
Alongside the format presets are ready-made social sizes, and you can save your own presets. HDR photographs keep their gain map on export where the format supports it.
Export never overwrites an existing file. If something is already there under that name, Muse writes beside it rather than over it.
Sharing a collection
Open a collection and use the share button in its header. Two ways out:
Save to… / Share lays the images out as a PDF at a paper size you pick — 11 × 14 in, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, A4 or A3 — and sends it on by AirDrop, Mail or Messages. The PDF reflects the layout you're looking at.
Share Drive Link signs you into your own Google Drive, uploads the images there, and creates a clean web page anyone can open in a browser. They can switch the background and print it to a PDF at any size.
Muse asks Google for the narrowest permission there is, so it can only ever touch files it created in your Drive — never the rest of it. The captions you type ride inside the link itself, not on any server. Nothing reaches Muse's developer: the copy goes to your Drive.
Every image is stripped of its metadata before it uploads, and Muse verifies the strip worked. If it can't verify a file is clean, the whole publish stops rather than uploading it.
Keyboard and menus
All keyboard shortcuts
| ⌘⌃N | New Subfolder… |
| ⌘R | Rename Folder… |
| ⌘⇧P | Pin or Unpin Folder |
| ⌘⇧A | Deselect All |
| ⌘D | Find Duplicates in Folder |
| Fn ↑ Fn ↓ | Page the grid up and down |
| ⌘1–⌘5 | Set the star rating |
| ⌘0 | No Rating |
| ⌘⌃R | Rename Tag… |
| ⌘⌥K | Clear Tag Filter |
| ⌘⌥N | New Collection from Selection… |
| ⌘⌥R | Rename Collection… |
| ⌘⌃C | Set as Collection Cover |
| ⌘L | Back to Library |
| ⌘U | Show or hide the controls |
| ⌘⇧C | Compare Side by Side |
| ⌘⌥C | Copy a look |
| ⌘⌥V | Paste a look, or Paste Adjustments |
| Esc | Close the viewer, a modal, or Compare |
| ⌘⇧I | Import ▸ Metadata & Lightroom Edits… |
| ⌘E | Export… |
| ⌘⇧L | Manage Drive Shares… |
| ⌘, | Settings… |
Privacy and your data
What stays on this Mac
Everything, by default. Muse collects nothing — no analytics, no telemetry, no accounts. Nothing about you or your files is ever sent to its developer. Indexing, analysis, search and editing all happen on your Mac.
Muse uses the network in four situations, and three of them only happen because you asked:
- App updates — checking for and downloading a new version.
- Sharing a collection to Drive — only when you sign in and press Publish. The files go to your own Google Drive.
- Announcements — one fetch of a small static file at launch. It sends nothing about you, and turning it off in Settings stops the fetch entirely.
- The search model — downloaded once, only if you accept the offer, and verified before it's unpacked.
That's the whole list. Read the full privacy policy.
iCloud sync
Muse can keep one folder in your iCloud Drive, synced across your Macs. Each image carries a small sidecar file of its tags, colors and analysis, so a second Mac picks all of it up without having to re-analyze anything.
This rides Apple's own iCloud sync. Muse itself makes no network call to do it. From Finder you can also right-click any file and choose Share ▸ Muse to send it into that folder.
Two things worth knowing. Sidecars don't carry the text read out of images, so a Mac that only received a file (rather than analyzing it itself) won't find that photo by words inside it. And identical files sitting in two different subfolders only get a sidecar beside the copy that was analyzed.
Back up and restore
Your collections, tags, ratings, notes and edits live in Muse's database on this Mac, not inside your files. Moving to a new machine means carrying that across too.
Choose Muse ▸ Back Up Muse… to save it all as a single file. Keep it somewhere safe and take it over with your photographs. On the new Mac, choose Muse ▸ Restore from Backup…, point Muse at your folders, and it reconnects everything by matching each file's actual contents — so it works even if you renamed or rearranged things along the way.
Collections whose files aren't on the new Mac simply don't appear. Nothing is left half-connected or broken.
Settings
Muse organizes automatically, but you decide how much of that it does.
- Automatic organization — automatically tag new images; automatically organize into collections. Turning either off applies to folders added from then on. Everything you already have is kept, and the manual commands still work.
- Grid — show file names, show star ratings, corner rounding.
- Sidebar — show Collections as a section; show the iCloud folder.
- Library — analysis progress, and a pause. Pausing only changes when the work runs; nothing is skipped.
- Search — download or remove the on-device search model.
- Google Drive — sign in to publish a collection, or sign out to switch accounts.
- Announcements — occasional notices. Off means the fetch doesn't happen at all.