Raw files are never written to.
Ratings, labels, captions and edits are saved beside each photo in a small sidecar file. The original stays exactly as the camera made it.
Image Lantern
Every shoot, card to client.
Ingest, cull, edit and deliver in one blazingly fast Mac app. Built for photographers who shoot in volume.
Download free trial
Try it free for 21 days. No credit card required.
Less AI.
More craft.
See every frame. Make every call.
Tools you actually need. No AI gimmicks. Nothing decides for you.
Six tools. One app.
IngestVerified copies of every card, backed up to multiple destinations.
- 461 MB/s with verification
- Resumes interrupted copies
- Rename and caption on the way in
- One key per star, pick or reject
- Live counts in the sidebar
- Every call is yours
- Rests from 30 seconds to 4 hours
- Tap a scene for its frames
- Every camera, one ruler
- Tone, curves, color, grain, glow
- Your LUTs in a library
- Edits in standard fields
- Filter by rating, camera, lens…
- Different folders, one run
- From sheet, folder or card
- Your look, baked in
- Originals untouched
- See the space needed first
Two verified copies before you touch a frame.
Each card is read once and written to your working drive and your backup at the same time. Every file is then checked against its checksum, read back from the disk itself.
- 461 MB/s from a USB card reader, verification on2
- A copy that gets interrupted picks up where it stopped
- Rename, caption and copyright as the photos come in
Every frame, at the speed of your keys.
Open a folder and it is on screen: 12,422 photos ready to cull in 1.3 seconds,1 with no import and no catalog to build. Stars, flags and color labels sit on the keys your hands already know.
- 1 to 5 for stars, P to pick, X to reject, 6 to 9 for labels
- The sidebar counts every rating, flag, label and marker
- Nothing chooses for you. You see every frame and make every call
Your whole shoot, scene by scene.
The shoot laid out on a timeline, one track for every camera. A scene is a stretch of shooting between rests, and a slider decides how long a rest is. The same wedding reads as eight scenes or eighty.
- Group by rests from 30 seconds to 4 hours
- Click a scene to see only its frames
- Every camera on the same time ruler
Your look, on every frame.
A Look is your starting point for the shoot. Each photo keeps its own exposure, white balance and crop on top of it, so one frame can change without touching the rest.
- Tone, curves, color grading, grain and glow
- Your own LUTs, kept in a library
- Saved in standard fields that other raw developers read
Set it up once.
Lay the steps of your job out on a canvas: keep the picks, add keywords, apply the look, copy to a folder. Save it by name and run it on the next shoot.
- Filter by rating, flag, label, camera, lens or time
- Send different photos to different folders in one run
- Starts from the contact sheet, a folder or a memory card
One export, every destination.
The client gallery, the web sizes and the originals leave together, each with its own size, format and folder. Save the setup as a preset and the next job is set up in one click.
- Rendered files carry your look, baked in
- Originals leave untouched
- See the space each destination needs before you start
Blazingly fast.
And we can prove it.
Thumbnails come from the previews your camera already wrote into each raw file, so nothing waits on a decode. These are readings from the app's own performance log.1
- 42.5ms
- to list every file in the folder
- 3ms
- to the first screen of thumbnails
- 1.3s
- until the whole shoot is ready to cull
- 461MB/s
- verified ingest from a USB card reader2
No catalog.
No worries.
Standard metadata.
Stars, flags, color labels, keywords and 61 IPTC fields are written the standard way, so the apps you already own read them.
Leave whenever you like.
Hand somebody the folder and they see your marks. Nothing lives in a database only this app can open.
No subscriptions.
Yours to keep.
Founders special
$179
Full price $249 after the special.
- 12 months of updates included
- The version you own keeps working forever
- More updates after that are $99 a year, only if you want them
- Requires macOS 26 or later and Apple silicon
Questions.
Which cameras does it open?
Raw files from most camera manufacturers, such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Olympus and Pentax, plus DNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, and PNG.
Do I have to import my photos?
No. Open a folder and it is on screen. There is no catalog. Your work is saved in a sidecar file beside each photo, so moving a shoot to another drive moves everything with it.
Will it change my raw files?
Never. Ratings, labels and edits go into sidecar files. JPEG and HEIC files keep their pixels too. Only their metadata is updated.
Can I keep using my current editor?
Yes. Everything is written in standard XMP fields, so stars, labels, keywords and the common image adjustments carry over in both directions.
What happens after the first year?
The app keeps working exactly as it is, for as long as you like. If you want the versions released after your first 12 months, renewing updates is $99 a year. Skip a year and nothing stops working.
How does the trial work?
Download the app and try it for 21 days. The trial is the full app with no limitations, and no credit card is required.
How the numbers were taken
- The second open of a folder of 12,422 raw files at 50 MP, on an internal SSD and Apple silicon. The first open of a new shoot builds its previews and takes about 13.5 seconds.
- 181 raw files (9.7 GB) from a card in a USB reader to the internal SSD, with verification on.