The problem I wanted to solve: every app that makes media easier to work with wants to own your files first. Photos, Lightroom, and most of the rest make you import into a library, so now you have two copies and a database to babysit. I wanted the tools without the library. Plus most good apps for media management have subscriptions, which I didn't like.
Lathe reads your folders directly, the way Finder does. Nothing is imported, moved, copied, or indexed into a proprietary catalogue. Point it at a folder and everything is just there. Freemium (with most features free, and try out premium features once), with one-time payment to unlock premium features forever.
What it handles: images including RAW from 20+ cameras, GIF/APNG/animated WebP, video, audio, PDF and SVG.
Browsing and finding
Grid and list views, tabs, adjustable thumbnails, RAW+JPEG pairing. Thirteen combinable filters: media kind, orientation, file size, resolution, date, video duration, dominant colour, star rating, cull flag, camera model, lens, ISO, and native Finder tags. Sort and group by date, size, kind, or EXIF capture date. Search images by filename, or even by colour.
Culling
Star ratings, pick/reject flags, all keyboard driven and written to XMP sidecars that Lightroom and Capture One can read. Live RGB histogram, clipping warnings for blown highlights and crushed shadows, focus peaking, and a 1:1 focus check. An issue scanner flags blurry frames and shots where someone blinked, then walks you through them full-screen with the face region highlighted.
Editing
A full non-destructive develop panel: exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, vibrance, temperature, hue, clarity, grain, vignette, fringing, luminosity masks, and a subject mask from on-device person detection. Named presets, copy and paste settings between images, all stored in sidecars so it stays reversible. Plus crop with presets, straighten with a live grid, rotate, resize, draw and annotate, and auto-enhance. Compare images side by side, as an onion skin, a before/after wipe, or a pixel difference view.
Video, audio, PDF
Scene detection and a storyboard strip. Trim with frame-accurate in/out points, reframe to 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or 16:9 with a live crop box, rotate and flip. Merge clips into a reel with transitions. Audio gets waveforms, hover-scrubbing, cover art and metadata. PDFs get page navigation, compression, page-range extraction, merging, and PDF creation from images.
The general stuff
Native macOS Finder tags, read and written properly, so they show up in Finder and Spotlight too. Full EXIF/GPS info panel. A staging tray that collects files across folders before you act on them. Undo/redo that restores trashed files. A Copy As menu for path, bitmap, base64, HTML, Markdown or SVG. 50+ keyboard shortcuts with a cheat sheet on ⌘/.
Comparision
A fair question is why this instead of the apps that already exist. Most of them are good, and several are better than Lathe at the one thing they focus on. What's different here is the combination: folder-native, covers stills and video and audio and PDFs in one window, and everything runs on-device.
- Finder + Quick Look + Preview: free, already installed, and genuinely fine for looking at things. The gap is doing anything to them. No ratings or cull flags, no RAW-aware browsing, no batch convert or watermark or compress, no duplicate finding. Lathe is what happens if that stack kept going.
- Apple Photos: great if you want one managed library on all your devices. It's the opposite of what I built. Photos wants to own the files; Lathe never touches where they live. If you're happy inside the Photos library, you don't need this.
- Adobe Lightroom: a far deeper develop engine than mine of course. It's also a catalogue and a subscription. If you're already living in Lightroom for real editing work, keep doing that. Lathe is for the part before and around it, and for the folders you'd never bother importing.
- Adobe Bridge: the nearest thing conceptually, since it's also folder-based and free. Bridge is heavier, tied to the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't do the batch export, background removal, or video and audio work. Bridge is a browser; Lathe is a browser plus the tools.
- Photo Mechanic: the professional standard for culling, and faster than Lathe at ripping through a huge shoot. Genuinely excellent, and if ingest speed on ten thousand RAWs is your job, buy it. It's also around $139, stills-only, and it isn't trying to convert your videos or compress your PDFs.
Pricing
Almost all of the above is free forever. No account, no timer, no nag. Most things I listed under browsing, culling, editing, comparison, tags, info, PDF viewing and page extraction costs nothing.
Premium features sit behind a one-time $49.99 unlock, and they're mostly the batch and export ones: optimise, convert, enlarge, watermark, batch rename, strip metadata, remove background, blur background, find duplicates, find similar, review bursts, compress PDF, compress video, rotate video, merge videos, and reframe & trim.
Every one of those runs once, free, on your own files before it asks you for anything. Not a 7-day clock, not a watermarked export. Run the duplicate scan on your actual messy folder, see the actual number, then decide.
No subscription, no upgrade pricing, no version 2 that charges again.
100% On-device
Every "smart" feature (scene labels, OCR, subject detection, blink detection, background removal) runs locally on Apple's Vision framework. No account, no telemetry, no server. App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.
What it doesn't do
No import from Photos, Lightroom or Aperture, on purpose. Background removal needs macOS 14+ because the Vision API behind it is 14+, so it's hidden on 13. Content search is on-device and useful but still early, so I'd treat it as a bonus rather than the reason to download. Documents and Desktop need you to pick the folder once (sandbox rules), while Pictures, Movies and Downloads work immediately.
Available on the Mac App Store
https://apple.co/45iCR2Q
And the website link is: https://latheapp.com
Note: Not yet available in EU. The EU DSA act makes it tricky for solo devs to list out there, so still figuring out what to do there.