flexGrid is a native macOS multi-video grid player for people with folders full of loops, references, outtakes, scans, and beautiful nonsense. Drop one in, hit play, and the whole pile becomes a living wall you can shuffle, lock, filter, and perform with.
Features
A photographer, a VJ, a streamer, and an archivist with a folder problem can all use the same app. They just press different parts of it.
Drop any folder onto the window and every clip starts playing — one tile, four tiles, up to nine on Free. No import wizard, no project file, no onboarding mascot asking how you feel about creativity. The first batch plays before the rest of the folder is even finished scanning.
Most video players stitch a loop by seeking to the beginning, which produces a tiny black flash and an audio click at the seam. flexGrid uses AVPlayerLooper under every cell. The seam is gone — you literally cannot see it happen.
Click any tile and the fullscreen overlay borrows the player that was already running in the cell. No rebuffer, no poster frame, no spinner. Click back and the cell never lost its place. Configurable dim, blur, optional background pause, session-persistent volume, three ways out (collapse, click, ESC).
Separate audio track for the room — MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, AAC — or one toggle to unmute every video at once (off by default; the cacophony warning is real). Plays even when the app is in the background. Volume persists across sessions.
Dynamic backgrounds with accent-color palettes on macOS 26. On macOS 15 (Sequoia), the same panels gracefully fall back to a calmer treatment that still looks like care. No Electron. No web wrapper. Same app from one source.
Nine App Intents cover shuffle, playback, grid size, blackout, freeze, lava lamp, and presentation. Chain flexGrid with the rest of your Mac in Shortcuts.app, or just ask Siri. The little smart-apartment dream we were promised in 1997 — turns out it shipped, quietly.
Time-aware greeting at launch, with a small rotating roster of sub-greetings that nudge without being chirpy. We didn't have to do this. We did it anyway.
Plus unlocks twelve- and sixteen-tile grids (up to 4×4) and lifts the scanning limit entirely. A folder of two photos still works. A folder of fifty thousand also works.
Treats your library like a very competent card dealer. Every item gets dealt before any repeat, and the deck stays balanced across eight dimensions at once — folder source, aspect ratio, duration, file type, codec, frame rate, audio presence, and a rolling sense of what just played. The result is a shuffle that feels hand-curated because the math is doing the curating.
Three content-aware layout buttons. flexGrid reads your media's aspect ratios — portrait, landscape, mixed — and recommends Portrait Gallery, Landscape Theater, or Uniform Stack. Click the one that fits the room you're in.
Cells prefer matching aspect ratios when filling, in two strengths — Preferred (suggests; can mix) or Strict (only ever a perfect fit). Per-cell or grid-wide. Photos stop landing in places where they had to be pillarboxed within an inch of their lives.
Filter by what's actually in the frame — faces, bodies, text, animals, scenes, brightness, monochrome, horizon tilt, blur or smudge, letterbox bands, even feature-print similarity. The Vision framework does the work on-device. A small progress ring on the status bar shows the analysis happening without nagging.
Fill to Face, Fill to Torso, Fill to Torso Only, Fill to Person, Zoom to Body, or Off. The cells reframe themselves around what matters and stay framed when the playhead moves. Sometimes the clip is right and the framing is just being weird; this fixes it.
On-device natural-language captions and tags via Apple's FoundationModels — macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence required. Your Mac writes the notes. Nothing leaves the device. You stop pretending you'll remember the file by its name.
Hover a cell and press P to flag it for later. Open the drawer to see what you saved, filter the grid down to just your picks, or clear them all. A shortlist for tasteful commitment-phobes.
Stack up to six items in a single grid slot — vertical or horizontal, your choice — and the cell cycles through them with the same gapless playback as a single clip. More content, fewer cells, no extra UI for what's effectively a little sub-grid.
A human-readable markup for custom grid layouts. Edit on the left, live preview on the right, save as a `.flexlayout` file. Share layouts with someone else's Mac and the file is the document.
Visual split-and-merge editing for grid cells, with six built-in presets to start from. Drag, divide, combine — exactly the table-like grid you're picturing, in the number of clicks you'd expect.
Give any cell its own timer with a visible progress ring. When it finishes, the grid can advance, shuffle, recall a scene, or black out. Stage management for people who prefer not to look like they're stage managing.
A live webcam feed in a grid cell. Pick the camera, mirror if you want, and you've got reactions, picture-in-picture, or a witness to the whole operation without opening a second app.
Subfolders become clickable grid cells with breadcrumbs and back navigation. Drop in a parent folder and the app turns into a calm, file-managed kiosk for whatever lives inside.
A reader pane next to the grid — four fonts, eight sizes, three themes. Notes alongside a presentation, a reference next to a review session, a chapter open on the porch while the wall does its thing.
Frame-accurate clip ranges per cell, plus a clean dissolve or fade between media. The grid stops being a folder dump and starts being something you composed.
Hide every toolbar with Cmd+Shift+I for a clean gallery look, and frame the whole grid with up to 100pt of adjustable padding. It stops looking like software and starts looking like you meant it.
Capture the current grid as a PNG. Export the canvas as a PNG with transparency. Same fidelity as the screen — full editorial-typography pipeline if the cells are using filters or branding overlays.
Optional real-time overlay for FPS, memory, and GPU. Mostly for the people who like to watch the numbers; secretly useful when you want to know which folder is hot.
Under the hood
Twelve specific decisions about how to play sixteen videos at once on a Mac without setting it on fire. Mostly invisible. Quietly the entire point.
The scanner works progressively. The first batch of media starts playing in under a second, even when there are tens of thousands of files behind it.
You don't sit through a loading bar. You drop the folder, the grid plays, and the rest scans in the background.
Every cell uses AVPlayerLooper, which keeps internal media replicas alive across the loop boundary. No seek, no buffer, no black flash.
Looping a video most places gives you a tiny stutter you stop noticing. Here, you literally cannot see it happen.
Click a tile to go fullscreen and the overlay borrows the player that was already running in the cell. The same engine just changes where it's drawing.
There's no rebuffer, no poster frame, no spinner. The grid keeps its place. You walk away and back.
The memory monitor pulls live numbers straight from the Mach kernel — `task_info` for resident memory, `thread_info` for per-thread CPU. The same data Activity Monitor uses.
Most apps pick a fixed quality and let your fan handle the cost. flexGrid tunes itself in four graduated tiers (Normal, Elevated, High, Critical) so the wall stays smooth as the room gets hot.
A PlayerPool keeps a small set of media players warm and recycles them across cells. When a tile changes content, the least-recently-used off-screen player has its URL swapped in — same engine, new file, no setup cost.
Spinning up a fresh AVPlayer drags a whole decode pipeline behind it. Recycling is why a sixteen-tile grid feels like four.
A metadata cache persists sixty-plus fields per file — aspect ratio, duration, codec, frame rate, Vision tags, saliency rectangles. Change detection compares `(fileSize, dateModified)` and only re-reads what actually changed.
Big folders that took minutes the first time load in milliseconds the next. The library remembers itself.
For images, flexGrid reads EXIF dimensions and orientation straight out of CGImageSource — including all eight EXIF rotation cases — without decoding a single pixel.
The layout math runs before the photos are even drawn. Grid composition is instant and never wrong about which way is up.
Press R and the next batch is already cooked. The engine pre-computes the next three batches of unseen items in the background after every shuffle, and pre-warms the thumbnails too.
The second shuffle is faster than the first. The third is faster than the second. You stop waiting for randomness.
SmartShuffle scores every candidate against a sliding window of what just played — weighted across file kind, aspect ratio, parent folder, date, duration, audio presence, codec, and frame rate.
A naïve shuffle clusters similar items by accident. This one feels hand-curated because the math is doing the curating.
Composite detection, brightness classification, monochrome detection, and letterbox detection share a single CGContext render — one pixel buffer, four analyses.
Four separate GPU-to-CPU copies would be the normal way. One copy is the considered way. A small progress ring in the status bar tells you the work is happening; nothing else nags.
FileRelinker resolves moved or renamed media by matching filename and file size, with sibling-folder inference for the cases where the rename took the parent with it.
Your saved collections survive a reorganisation. The wall stays whole.
Loading and analysis use concentric pulsing rings (a BreathingIndicator) and small inline PulsingDot accents. ProgressView spinners were retired across the app.
When a calm app has to make you wait, it can do it calmly. The wait stops feeling like the app is in trouble.
None of these are flagship features on their own. The flagship is that you don't have to know about any of them — you just notice that the wall plays, the loops are clean, the seams don't show, and your fan stays quiet.
Use cases
Smart Layout Presets reads your folder's aspect ratios and picks Portrait Gallery, Landscape Theater, or Uniform Stack. Auto-Advance turns the timer up. Paneless mode hides every toolbar. The wall runs itself; you go make coffee.
Drop a folder, turn on Art Gallery, and let it cycle like a very expensive screensaver that went to film school and won't stop referencing Tarkovsky.
Sixteen frames at once. Lock the keepers. Flag the maybees. The Picks drawer is there for when commitment feels a little fascist.
Countdowns, clocks, auto-advance, and a grid that keeps itself together without needing an intern or a sacrificial browser tab.
Scenes for every section, PDFs in the side pane, output on one screen and controls on yours. It looks less like a slideshow and more like you planned your life.
Sixteen tiles. Vision tags filter for faces, brightness, or scenes. Subject Zoom reframes each one around the person. Pick Tray flags the keepers. Then collage-export the contact sheet, on transparent PNG, for the file you'll never name correctly.
Pricing
No subscriptions, no membership cult, no little renewal email arriving at 4:12 a.m. Two tiers, one purchase. Free is generous on purpose, and Plus is where the engine starts to show off.
flexGrid v1 focuses on rock-solid core loading and playback. A handful of layout experiments — Masonry, SmartFlex, Canvas, Mood matching — are benched while we retool them, and they're listed on the roadmap below.
On the roadmap
v1 is about core loading and playback being boringly reliable. A few features arrived wearing too much jewelry and not enough discipline, so we mothballed them until they deserve their entrance music.
Drag-to-resize columns and rows, cell spanning, hero-plus-grid layouts. Benched for v1; rebuilding on a calmer engine before it makes its return so it stops fighting the rest of the layout system for the wheel.
Blank-cell collage builder with per-cell drag-and-drop. Returning alongside the SmartFlex rework so both features can stop fighting over the furniture.
Thirty-plus magazine-style templates with varied cell sizes for visual variety. Paused while we give the template set fewer filler episodes and tune the algorithm to play nicely with Smart Layout Presets.
Auto-arrange cells by color gradient, visual energy, or similarity clusters. Paused while we revisit the clustering model and ask it to be less chaotic-neutral.
Styled export with titles, subtitles, and filename labels for client-ready deliverables. Returning alongside Canvas once both of them have better manners.
Full-window metaball shader with eight color palettes. Benched for v1 because if it ships, it needs to glide — not cough theatrically on older Macs. Coming back when the shader scheduler is happy on any supported Mac.
No roadmap dates. We ship when it's ready, not when the internet gets fidgety.
Design philosophy
flexGrid reads memory pressure and CPU load at the kernel level, then trims caches, recycles off-screen players, and skips the pricey stuff automatically. You don't have to babysit it with a settings spreadsheet. It just keeps the party from getting tacky.
Read the engineering gossip →Where it doesn't fit
flexGrid plays your folder as a wall. The cuts, the keying, the live mix — those tools stay where you put them, and flexGrid stays where it earns its keep.
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon or any Intel Mac with Metal. Liquid Glass UI, Smart Captions, and the AI export effects want macOS 26 and Apple Silicon. Everything else is less emotionally needy.
No. There is no sign-in screen because there is no sign-in cult. No accounts, no sync, no analytics, no network calls for features. Your Mac already knows enough about you.
Absolutely not. Free is a real tier, not a bread crumb trail. Plus is a one-time purchase through StoreKit 2. You buy it once and then everyone can go lie down.
Free is a fully functional multi-video grid player — drop a folder, play up to nine tiles, shuffle, lock, loop, go fullscreen, automate with Siri & Shortcuts, all of it. Plus is where the engine starts to show off: bigger grids (up to sixteen), SmartShuffle's eight-dimension balance, on-device Vision tags and Subject Zoom, Smart Captions, Pick Tray, FlexLayout editor, Grid Designer, Smart Layout Presets, Aspect Match, and the unlimited-everything caps.
They're real, they're beloved, and they're temporarily in the penalty box. v1's priority is rock-solid loading and playback; those features needed more refinement than we could finish without lying through our teeth.
Video: MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, MKV. Images: JPG, PNG, HEIC, GIF, TIFF, WebP. Background audio: MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, AAC. ePub and PDF in the side pane. If your Mac can play it, flexGrid can usually turn it into a wall.
macOS 15.0 (Sequoia) or later. Liquid Glass UI and on-device Smart Captions require macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence. The rest of the engine runs on Apple Silicon or Intel with Metal — 8 GB of RAM or more is comfortable for the bigger grids.
The TestFlight beta is free while we polish the launch build. You'll know within a minute whether flexGrid is your thing, which is more than we can say for most software relationships.
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