Features in depth

What each part of flexGrid actually does, and why we let it in the house.

A walkthrough of the v1 feature set, minus the startup cosplay. Free and Plus are the tiers; a handful of beloved troublemakers — Masonry, SmartFlex, Canvas, Mood matching, Mood board export, Lava Lamp — are parked on the roadmap while we retool them.

Discovery

Plus

SmartShuffle

SmartShuffle treats your library like a deck of cards. It deals every item before any card is dealt twice — so a long session reveals everything you have, in an order that always feels fresh. As it deals, it balances across folders, aspect ratios, and durations so portraits don't pile up next to portraits and short clips don't all land in the same corner.

◆ Status bar shows progress through the current pass ("Seen 83 of 247")
◆ Locked tiles are respected — only unlocked cells are reshuffled
◆ Combine with Auto-Advance for an endless self-curating display

Vision

Plus

Vision tags & subject zoom

flexGrid analyzes your media on-device using Apple's Vision framework. 18+ smart filters — faces, bodies, text, animals, scenes, brightness, B&W, horizon tilt, blur, smudge, letterbox, composite detection, and feature-print perceptual similarity — become one-click grid filters with SF Symbol icons. Subject Zoom offers six framing modes: Fill to Face, Fill to Torso, Fill to Torso Only, Fill to Person, Zoom to Body, or Off. None of this analysis ever leaves your machine.

◆ 18+ content filters with SF Symbol icons, including perceptual similarity via feature prints
◆ Subject Zoom with 6 framing modes — from tight face crop to full-body framing
◆ All analysis runs on-device; results cached for instant re-use

Curation

Plus

Pick Tray

Press P on any hovered cell to flag it for later. An orange flag marks the pick, and the Picks drawer collects thumbnails of everything you've flagged this session. Filter the grid down to just your picks, then decide what stays. It's a shortlist, not a commitment — designed to be cleared often.

◆ Press P to toggle, or click the flag icon directly
◆ Picks drawer with thumbnails; one-click "Show Picks as Grid"
◆ Picks persist between sessions but are meant to be ephemeral

Automation

Plus

Countdown timers, web feeds & reaction camera

Give any cell a countdown timer with a visible progress ring — when it finishes, the grid can advance, shuffle, or recall a scene. Swap a cell for a live web page, an RSS feed, or a raw HTML snippet. Or drop in your webcam for picture-in-picture reactions. Three small tools that turn the grid into a dashboard, a show clock, or a streaming setup.

◆ Per-cell countdown timers with configurable completion actions
◆ Up to 4 web feed cells per grid, with CSS and auto-refresh
◆ Live webcam feed with camera selection and horizontal mirror

Layout · Plus

Plus

Smart Layout Presets & Aspect Match

Three content-aware buttons — A / B / C — read the aspect ratios in your folder and pick the layout that suits the room. Portrait Gallery, Landscape Theater, or Uniform Stack. Aspect Match holds the line per cell, in two strengths: Preferred (suggest) or Strict (only ever a perfect fit). Photos stop landing in places where they had to be pillarboxed into apologising for themselves.

◆ Three content-aware preset buttons (A/B/C)
◆ Aspect Match in Preferred or Strict mode, per-cell or grid-wide
◆ Pool exhaustion handling: refill & suggest, refill silently, or adapt layout

Composition · Plus

Plus

QuickFill, FlexLayout & Grid Designer

Three ways to compose a grid that aren't a list. QuickFill stacks up to six items per slot and cycles them with the same gapless playback as a single clip. FlexLayout takes a human-readable markup, previews it live, and saves a `.flexlayout` file you can share. Grid Designer is the visual version — split, merge, drag, with six built-in presets to start from.

◆ QuickFill cells stack up to 6 items per slot (vertical or horizontal)
◆ FlexLayout editor with live preview and `.flexlayout` file format
◆ Grid Designer with visual split/merge and 6 starter presets

Intelligence

Plus

Smart Captions

On-device AI captioning and tagging powered by Apple's FoundationModels framework. Point it at your grid and get natural-language descriptions for each piece of media — without a single byte leaving your Mac. Useful for accessibility, for search, or for remembering why you kept that clip in the first place.

◆ Natural-language descriptions generated entirely on-device
◆ Requires macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence enabled
◆ Tags integrate with Vision filters for combined search

Automation

Free

Siri & Shortcuts

Nine App Intents expose flexGrid to Shortcuts.app and Siri. Automate shuffle, play/pause, grid size changes, blackout, freeze, lava lamp, and presentation mode — from a voice command, a keyboard shortcut, or a multi-step Shortcut that chains flexGrid with the rest of your tools.

◆ 9 intents: shuffle, play, pause, grid size, blackout, freeze, lava lamp, presentation, open
◆ Works with Siri voice commands on macOS 15+
◆ Chain with other apps in Shortcuts.app for complex automations

Calm

Free

Quick Hide & calm UX

Calm software knows when to disappear. A global hotkey blanks the screen, stops playback, and hides the entire app instantly — useful when someone walks into the room. Tap again and you're back exactly where you left off. Loading states use breathing indicators instead of spinners, the startup greeting is time-aware, and Reduce Motion is honored everywhere.

◆ Global hotkey toggles instant blank screen
◆ Breathing indicators replace spinners
◆ Reduce Motion and VoiceOver supported throughout

On the roadmap

Temporarily mothballed. Still on payroll.

These features were built and tested, but they need a deeper retool before they meet our bar. They're disabled in v1 and will return later, ideally with better posture and fewer chaos tendencies.

Plus Returning

SmartFlex Grid

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.

Plus Returning

Canvas mode

Blank-cell collage builder with per-cell drag-and-drop. Returning alongside the SmartFlex rework so both features can stop fighting over the furniture.

Plus Returning

Masonry layout

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.

Plus Returning

Mood matching

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.

Plus Returning

Mood board export

Styled export with titles, subtitles, and filename labels for client-ready deliverables. Returning alongside Canvas once both of them have better manners.

Free Returning

Lava Lamp mode

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.

What we don't ask for

The features only matter if the app isn't secretly being weird.

On-device

Vision, VideoToolbox, CoreImage, Metal — every AI/ML feature runs locally, not in some haunted warehouse of GPUs.

No accounts

No sign-in. No sync. No cloud. No telemetry. Your clips are not content for a dashboard.

Native macOS

SwiftUI · AVFoundation · Strict Swift 6 concurrency. Not Electron. Not a browser wearing expensive shoes.

One-time pricing

Free is real. Plus is a one-time purchase via StoreKit 2. No subscriptions, because enough already.

Want the engineering gossip?

The systems that keep a 25-video grid smooth on a MacBook Air: borrowed players, four-tier caching, and enough adaptive performance logic to avoid public embarrassment.

Read the design notes → Browse the help center