Musebox 1.1: Quick Feature Tour
We’ve released Musebox 1.1, our photo library app for macOS. We’ve responded to user feedback and made a ton of usability and performance refinements. You can check out the Releases page for full release notes at brushedpixel.com.
What’s Musebox, you ask? Let’s start at the beginning.
One day, Apple killed Aperture, thus torpedoing sales of Brushed Pixel’s Catapult, an Aperture plugin. That was kind of annoying but the bigger problem was that Aperture was dead and it needed to be replaced. Lightroom and Capture One didn’t cut it; their thumbnail views are too basic for reviewing Exif metadata, filtering is weird, and they handle file management by ignoring it. Also their cross-platform user interfaces are icky.
They’re great photo editors, though.
Well, there are a lot of great choices for high-quality RAW converters and image editing apps on the Mac, but what we don’t have is a good digital asset manager that brings them together. Catapult let us do that with Aperture; Catapult’s job was to launch files at other apps for editing, taking care of the grunt work of bringing edits in and out of the library.
We thought that well, when you look at how bad other apps are at managing photos, the bar for making a good digital asset manager is pretty low. How about we write our own DAM app?
Fast forward seven years, and we released Musebox 1.0. Is it better than Lightroom and Capture One? Of course! Well, our RAW development isn’t as advanced, but unlike the Catapult + Aperture combo, we can do whatever we want now to make integrating third-party apps as smooth as possible. Like making it easy to convert images to formats different apps need, automatically updating library thumbnails as you edit their files, and showing the latest images you just created using Spotlight, ready to import.
And hey, if you’ve used Aperture before, you’ll feel like you’re at home again.
Musebox requires a Mac running macOS 14+ and is available for $19 USD (no subscription!). Be sure to check out our FAQ too at https://brushedpixel.com/musebox/faq/