Mac apps

Standalone applications

Download, open, done. No API keys, no Terminal, no monthly fee.

New £10

PortCheck

See what your ports, cables and drives are actually doing

A cable can say 40 Gb/s, negotiate 20, and deliver 3. So can a dock, and so can the socket you plugged it into. They all look identical from the outside, and macOS will not tell you which one you are living with.

PortCheck keeps four different facts apart, because they usually get sold to you as one number.

Socket can do
40 Gb/s
Cable
G-RAID
Link agreed
40 Gb/s
Measured
176 MB/s

A real reading. Socket fine, cable fine, link fine, and the drive still crawls. One number could never have told you that.

  • Reads the chip inside your cable, so two identical cables are told apart by the socket they are in
  • Measures real sustained throughput, with the disk cache stepped around, not a burst figure
  • Says plainly whether the link or the drive is the bottleneck
  • Drive temperature, wear, hours in service, error counts and health
  • Keeps a history, so a drive slowly running hotter shows itself before it strands you
  • One click to copy a plain text report for a producer, a client or a manufacturer
The socket that halves your speed
Front socket, USB only 740 MB/s
Back socket, Thunderbolt 3,619 MB/s
Same drive, same enclosure, same machine. Some USB-C sockets on a Mac are faster than others. They take the same connector, they look identical, and nothing on screen tells you which one you just used.
Platform
Mac, Apple Silicon
Requires
macOS 13 Ventura or later
Price
£10, one payment
Updates
Free within version 1
Setup difficulty
1/10, download it and open it
Optional extra
  • Drive temperature, wear and error counts come from smartmontools, a free open source helper
  • PortCheck cannot bundle it, because its licence does not allow inclusion in paid software
  • The app gives you the one command to install it, and picks it up automatically afterwards
  • Everything else works without it

Nothing leaves your Mac. No account, no telemetry, no licence check that phones home. PortCheck makes no network connections of any kind.

New Free

Emailable JPG

Any image, resized and ready to send in one drop

Camera files and screenshots are rarely sized for email. Emailable JPG takes any image you drop onto it and creates a smaller, compressed copy next to the original, ready to attach straight away.

  • Works with JPG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, PSD and most camera RAW files
  • Resizes to 1200px on the long edge
  • Saves the copy beside the original, named clearly
  • No settings, no dialogue boxes, just drag and drop
Platform
Mac
Requires
Recent macOS, Intel or Apple Silicon
Price
Free
Signed
Notarised by Apple
Setup difficulty
1/10, download it and open it

Nothing leaves your Mac. Emailable JPG makes no network connections of any kind. It only reads and writes the files you drop onto it.

Lightroom Classic plugins

Inside Lightroom

Keywording, metadata and copyright registration, without leaving the catalogue. All three are open source under MIT.

£10

KeywordAI

AI keyword suggestions

Stop spending hours keywording. KeywordAI analyses your images and suggests up to 30 relevant keywords in seconds, directly inside Lightroom Classic.

  • Reads subject, location, lighting, mood, colour and style
  • Review mode, so you tick the keywords you want
  • Batch mode, for whole selections with no interruptions
  • JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP and RAW with a Lightroom preview
  • Applied straight to your photo metadata
Works with
Lightroom Classic 5 and later
Platform
Mac, Apple Silicon. Windows to follow
Licence
MIT, open source
Running cost
About $0.01 per photo
Setup difficulty
7/10, needs an Anthropic API key and credits
£10

IPTCFiller

AI IPTC metadata

Professional metadata matters for stock, press and archiving. IPTCFiller populates title, description and caption fields automatically, inside Lightroom Classic.

  • Fills IPTC title, description and caption
  • Writes contextually accurate metadata per image
  • Review mode, to check and edit before applying
  • Batch mode, for whole selections
  • Built for stock, press and professional archiving
Works with
Lightroom Classic 5 and later
Platform
Mac, Apple Silicon. Windows to follow
Licence
MIT, open source
Running cost
About $0.01 per photo
Setup difficulty
7/10, needs an Anthropic API key and credits
£10

Copyright Helper

US Copyright Office registration

Registering photographs with the US Copyright Office, made straightforward. A step by step wizard that never leaves Lightroom Classic.

  • Reads your photo metadata automatically
  • Generates the official title list for group registration
  • Exports deposit copies at the correct size
  • Saves everything ready to upload to copyright.gov
  • No API key and no Python, it runs entirely in Lightroom
Works with
Lightroom Classic 5 and later
Platform
Mac and Windows
Licence
MIT, open source
Running cost
None. Filing fee is paid to the Copyright Office
Setup difficulty
2/10, install it in Lightroom and nothing else
What you need for KeywordAI and IPTCFiller
  • Adobe Lightroom Classic, version 5 or later
  • A Mac with Apple Silicon, M1 or later
  • macOS 12 Monterey or later
  • An Anthropic API key, free account at console.anthropic.com
  • API credits, minimum $5, which covers hundreds of photos

Running cost. Around $0.01 per photo or less. Both AI plugins share one Anthropic account, so a single $5 top up covers them together. You pay for what you use, with no subscription.

Copyright Helper needs none of that. No API key, no credits. You will need a free eCO account at copyright.gov/eco and the Copyright Office filing fee, currently $55 for a group of up to 750 photographs.

Save on the set

Plugin bundle

Save £10

All three plugins

One download, one payment

Everything you need to automate keywording, metadata and copyright registration, without leaving Lightroom Classic.

  • KeywordAI, AI keyword suggestions for your photos
  • IPTCFiller, AI metadata using GPS and image analysis
  • Copyright Helper, step by step US Copyright Office registration
Works with
Lightroom Classic 5 and later
Platform
Mac, Apple Silicon. Windows to follow
Price
£25, saving £5
Licence
MIT, open source
Before you start
  • A Mac with Apple Silicon, M1 or later
  • macOS 12 Monterey or later
  • An Anthropic API key for the two AI plugins
  • Around $5 of API credits, which covers hundreds of photos
Documentation

Guides and support

Free to read before you buy, and the same pages you get afterwards.

Lightroom plugins, setup and support

Complete documentation for all three plugins

Installing, configuring and troubleshooting. Covers the bundle installer and the individual plugin downloads, getting your Anthropic API key, and the questions people ask most.

What the guide covers
  • Bundle installer, step by step
  • Individual plugin downloads, setup and placement
  • Getting your Anthropic API key
  • Using KeywordAI, IPTCFiller and Copyright Helper
  • Twelve common questions and their solutions
In progress

Coming soon

Mac app
PortCheck for Intel

The same app, built for Intel Macs, once it has been tested on real Intel hardware.

Lightroom plugin
CaptionWriter

AI captions for editorial and press, formatted for wire submission.

Lightroom plugin
StyleSort

Sort and tag photos by shooting style, mood and visual category.

Have an idea for
a new tool?

These all started as something that annoyed us on a job. If there is something you would find useful, we would like to hear about it.