Why I Built Scrapbook

I spent most of my career as a graphic designer. Years of juggling files, project folders, client archives, visual references. Hunting for one specific image among thousands. Extracting a color from a photo to pass on to a printer. Organizing without losing track.

When I retired, I did something simple: I cancelled my Adobe subscriptions. After years of paying monthly for a suite I was using a fraction of, the time had come to turn the page. And that's when the problem became concrete.

The tool that disappeared

There was once a remarkable piece of software on Mac: iView MediaPro. For those who never knew it, it was exactly what a media manager should be — fast, lightweight, native macOS, built for creatives. Not for studio photographers with NAS servers, not for agencies with dedicated IT budgets. For graphic designers, independent photographers, people who work alone or in small teams with their files.

In 2006, Microsoft acquired iView and rebranded the software as Expression Media. The integration into the Microsoft world gradually distanced the tool from its Mac roots. In 2010, Phase One picked it up and launched Media Pro — a version more oriented towards professional photographers, with large catalogs and advanced RAW workflows.

To migrate, Phase One recommended switching to Capture One — an excellent piece of software, but one that requires a subscription and does much more (and costs much more) than most graphic designers need to simply browse and organize their files.

Since 2018, that niche has remained empty on Mac. Adobe Bridge exists, but it requires Creative Cloud. Cross-platform alternatives work, but none of them are truly native macOS in the deeper sense of the word.

Going back to learning

Retirement is also an opportunity to do things you've been putting off. For me, that meant learning to develop Mac apps. Not to make it a career — but because I had a concrete problem to solve, and after decades of using tools built by others, I wanted to build one myself.

Swift and SwiftUI are languages designed for exactly that. Apple has done remarkable work to make macOS development accessible. I learned, stumbled, started over. And gradually, Scrapbook took shape — the result of my cogitations, as I like to say.

What I kept, what I added

From iView's spirit, I kept the essentials: lightness, speed, focus on the file rather than the catalog. Scrapbook works with your existing folders — no importing, no indexing, no database to manage. You open a folder, you see your files.

But in 2026, needs have evolved. RAW files are everywhere. So are 3D files — USDZ, OBJ, GLB. Designers extract color palettes from reference photos. They work simultaneously in InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects and need to drag and drop in a single gesture.

So I added what iView was missing: automatic color palette extraction (K-means++ algorithm in CIE LAB space, export as HEX, CMYK, RAL, .ase), 3D preview, a complete EXIF and IPTC metadata inspector, customizable color labels, custom extension filters.

The return of iView Media Pro

And as the months went by, one thing became obvious. If I was building the tool I wanted to find again after iView, I also needed to let its former users recover their catalogs. Not tell them "redo everything by hand." Not ask them to go through a fragile pivot format. Something direct.

So I wrote an .ivc file transcriber. You drag your old iView Media Pro catalog onto Scrapbook, and the application rebuilds a .sbpixixel library with your Sets, labels, ratings, keywords, and links to originals. Files you can't find (external drive not plugged in, moved folder) remain visible with an "orphan" badge; a right-click launches a Spotlight search to recover them. The original .ivc file is never touched.

I don't know of any other tool on Mac that does this today. For me, it's the gesture that closes the loop.

Local intelligence, because files are sacred

The other major addition is AI indexing. But with a radical stance: everything is computed locally. On your Mac. With Apple's system libraries — Vision.framework, CoreImage, CryptoKit. No image, no excerpt, no vector leaves your computer. No cloud, no account, no remote service.

In practice, this gives you bilingual automatic visual tags (animals, landscapes, objects, scenes), face counting and a technical sharpness score to spot blurry images at a glance, duplicate detection via perceptual hash (which also finds cropped or recompressed duplicates), visual similarity search, and above all a natural language search — type "beach sunset dog" and the tool simultaneously queries AI tags, your keywords, the IPTC, and your metadata edits.

The discipline of DAM

Peter Krogh, in The DAM Book, states the golden rule: original files are sacred. No tool should write to them — not metadata, not rotations, nothing. I took this discipline seriously. Scrapbook never writes to your files. All your edits — title, keywords, description, copyright, custom fields — live in the local catalog. Renamed exports and XMP sidecars are written to separate files.

I added a SHA-256 integrity monitor that computes the fingerprint of each file and flags any silent alteration — disk corruption, bit rot, accidental modification. And for those who want to inspect, the .sbpixixel catalog is not a locked proprietary format: it's a macOS bundle containing a standard catalog.sqlite file (readable by any SQL tool) and a thumbnail folder in standard image format. Right-click, "Show Package Contents": everything is inspectable. If Scrapbook disappears one day, your work remains usable.

And a few useful extras

Along the way I added what I was missing daily: an advanced multi-criteria search (dates, size, GPS, ISO, focal length, keywords, must/must not contain), an interactive GPS map view to find photos from a trip, batch rename with tokens ({original}, {counter}, {date}, {camera}) at export, batch metadata editing, export of an MP4 video slideshow encoded in hardware H.264 to share a selection with a client.

Same rule throughout: none of this touches the original files.

Pricing as a statement of values

I could have made it a subscription. That's the model that maximizes revenue on paper. But as a former graphic designer who just cancelled his Adobe subscriptions, I know that feeling too well: paying every month for a tool you use maybe twice a week.

Scrapbook is sold as a one-time purchase. You try it free for a month. If the tool fits your needs, you buy it once. That's it. The price varies slightly by country — Apple adjusts automatically based on local pricing zones — but the idea stays the same: pay once, use forever.

No account required. No data sent anywhere. Your files stay on your Mac, as they always have been.

What comes next

Scrapbook keeps evolving, but the framework stays the same: few things, done well. iView Media Pro was good because it didn't try to be Lightroom. I'd rather ship a feature when it's truly ready than deliver something half-baked.

If you knew iView or MediaPro, if you still have your old .ivc files on a hard drive somewhere, if you're looking for a simple tool to manage your creative files on Mac without subscriptions or cloud — Scrapbook is built for you.