Tools Chris built for his own Photography / Mac workflows
Mac and iPhone apps from a working photographer — built because the shoot, or the week, in front of us needed them, and shared because yours probably does too. Free while they are in beta.
Free, and everything they do happens on your own machine.
Push-to-talk dictation that runs entirely on your Mac — no account, no upload, no internet. The text appears wherever your cursor was, cleaned up differently depending on which app you are in.
Sits beside Lightroom Classic and shows every face in the selected photo as a true 100% crop from the RAW — plus where the camera actually focused. No 1:1 previews, no waiting.
The fastest way to offload photos to your computer — from a single person to multiple photographers with multiple cameras over a multi-day shoot. Opens the moment a card goes in, splits it into shoots by capture time, works out whose camera took what, and lands it in your folders under your names, verified byte for byte.
Tap a key to nudge any develop slider by the amount you choose, apply a preset to every selected photo, or fire Upright, AI Denoise, masking, ratings and flags. Slider keys work in Library too, moving each photo from its own settings. A floating panel adds what Lightroom doesn't: pick a series shot in the same light, match it, then slide the exposure and white balance of the whole set together. Match White Balance works per camera, so mixed bodies keep their native profiles, and Reset Tint puts the camera's tint back without touching your Kelvin. A small overlay in Lightroom shows every change.
Menu bar app with a floating panel. Installs its own Lightroom plug-in. macOS 14 or later.
Backblaze backs up continuously on your home Wi-Fi and waits on a hotspot or anywhere else. Pick other apps to pause too — Dropbox, Aftershoot — and they stop when you leave and pick back up when you're home. Shows what's using your data right now, and warns you when something burns through a lot of it on the road.
A live map of your whole Dropbox with the size, file count and newest date on every folder — something dropbox.com won't show you. Filter to what you shared or what was shared with you, check off what should go or drag it where it belongs, and nothing changes until you press Commit.
Beta. It moves and deletes real files in your Dropbox, only when you press Commit.
Built for problems that were mine first. Ask and I will add you to a beta.
Everybody's day side by side, built from the calendars your family already uses. Tap a face to see just that person's day, tag who's coming and it lands on their calendar too, and Home for the day tells you when everyone will be back. Built because no shared-calendar app survived a family that already had four calendars each.
Appointment alarms that break through silent mode and Focus, because a calendar notification you have muted is not a reminder. Built after one too many near-misses on a shoot morning.
immino.app is registered but still a parked page — the site is to come.
Golden hour, weather, fog, tides, cloud cover off the satellite, and how long the drive takes — for the spot you are shooting, on the day you are shooting it. Built for scouting a coast where the difference between a good shoot and a wasted drive is one bank of fog.
forelight.co is registered but still a parked page — the site is to come.
Built and in daily use here, not packaged for anyone else yet.
It reads your finished edits out of your own Lightroom catalog and learns how you actually develop — then hands the next shoot a starting point in your look instead of a generic profile. Selected photos get their sliders set inside Lightroom Classic; a second path writes sidecars straight after ingest, before anything has opened.
- Trained on about 36,000 of Chris's own finished photos across 174 shoots.
- Three models, because measurement said so: headshots are a different problem and do 24% better trained alone, while family work does 46% WORSE alone and belongs in the pool.
- The single biggest gain came from one input — the camera's own as-shot white balance — which cut the error 40% on its own.
- 1,098 photos in 174 seconds, inside Lightroom — the run in the video below.
Developer beta. It learns one photographer's look from that photographer's own catalog, so every model is personal — training for other photographers is being built now.
Copies a photo library or Lightroom catalog from the laptop to an external drive, and shows you exactly what will change before anything moves. It will never let an older file overwrite a newer one.
Tuck the icons you rarely use behind a single chevron. Hover it and they slide back into the bar with their menus working as usual, then roll away again. Asks for no permissions at all.
A keyboard whose only job is snippets: switch to it, type a short abbreviation, and the full text lands with its line breaks intact — something the iPhone's own text replacement flattens.
Capture a gift idea for someone you love in the second you spot it, so it's still there by the birthday.