Mesmerizing

A personal dashboard for digital keepsakes.

macOS · CHF 20 · One-time

Drag your images, videos, voice notes and 3D models straight into the window. Plus PDFs, sheet music, code, palettes and fonts — every file becomes a tile with a real preview. Move things, resize them, and a double-click flips the whole canvas from white through glass to black.

Everything lives as real files in a folder on your Mac: no database, no account, no cloud. Runs fully offline. Buy once, use forever.

You split your work into projects, each with up to nine boards. And put a project in a shared cloud folder, and two of you work on it — without ever overwriting each other.

Bonus: mark a tile for Claude and just say “take the marked image” in your Claude session — no upload, no hunting for file paths.

Core features

Drag anything in

Images, videos, audio, 3D models, PDFs, text, code and Markdown — just drag them into the window. Every file becomes a tile.

A real preview for every format

3D models spin, videos play, PDFs page through, sheet music renders as an actual score, palettes show their colours, fonts set themselves — and you read text, code and Markdown right on the canvas. No file icons. Real previews.

Arrange and resize freely

Move tiles by drag & drop, three sizes each — order and sizes are remembered.

Five backgrounds

One click on the background switches the whole surface — from white through to black, right into the window bar. Plus a whitespace slider from 3 to 400 pixels.

Mark for Claude

Mark an image on its tile and use it straight from Claude Code — “take the marked image”, no upload, no detour.

100% local, no subscription

Your media stays as normal files in your folder. No cloud, no account, no subscription — buy once, use forever.

Projects

Split your work into projects — at launch you pick the one you want to carry on with. Each project brings its own boards, up to nine of them.

A project, shared

Put a project in a shared cloud folder and you both work on it. One writes, the other sees “currently being edited by …” — so nothing gets overwritten. Honestly though: depending on the cloud, changes take seconds to minutes, and both Macs need to run the same version.

Export as PDF

One board with ⌘E, all of them with ⇧⌘E — as clean A4 pages that never cut a tile in half, or as one endless sheet.

FAQ

Where are my files stored?

In a folder you choose on your Mac, as plain files. You can open it in Finder anytime — Mesmerizing is just the nice view on top.

Does Mesmerizing need internet or a server?

No, Mesmerizing runs fully offline on your Mac. Internet is only needed once, briefly, to activate the license.

Which file formats does Mesmerizing understand?

Images (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, AVIF, RAW, SVG), video (MP4, WebM, MOV), audio (MP3, WAV, M4A and more), 3D models (GLB, OBJ, STL, STEP, IGES), PDF, EPUB, CSV, Jupyter notebooks and many design/office files as previews, plus text, code and Markdown. Colour palettes, font specimens and link cards (Maps, YouTube, Spotify, Figma) become tiles of their own too. It goes back out as PDF — paginated A4 or one continuous strip.

What does “Mark for Claude” mean?

Mesmerizing plays nicely alongside Claude Code: mark an image on its tile and refer to it directly in a Claude Code session — no uploading or dragging in. Handy when you work with your reference images.

Is there a subscription?

No. Mesmerizing is a one-time purchase — pay once, use forever. Updates within the major version included.

Does Mesmerizing work as a moodboard or reference board?

That is exactly what it is built for: arrange reference images, clips and notes freely on a canvas — except everything lives with you as real files instead of in someone's cloud. Great for designers, photographers and anyone who thinks visually.

Can two of us work on one board?

Yes. Put a project in a shared cloud folder (iCloud, Dropbox …) and you both work on it. While one edits, the other side sees “currently being edited by …” — so nothing gets overwritten. Honestly though: depending on the cloud, changes take seconds to minutes, and both Macs should run the same version.

System requirements

A Mac with macOS 13 (Ventura) or later — universal for Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) and Intel. Around 40 MB of disk space. Runs fully offline; internet is only used once, briefly, to activate the license. Not for Windows, iPhone or iPad.