FAQ

The download is free and includes a 14-day trial of everything. After that, browsing stays free; captions, ratings, renaming, import and export need the unlock: USD 99.99 once (launch price USD 69.99 until June 2027). No subscription.

No account. Eikonaut never sends a photo anywhere. It goes online only when you run an upload script after an export.

Macs with Apple silicon, macOS 14 Sonoma or later; tested on macOS 14 and on the current macOS. A version for Windows is not planned.

Yes. Captions, keywords and ratings are in your files, in the standard IPTC and XMP fields, and Eikonaut reads them as they are. RAW sidecars (.xmp next to the RAW) are read and written too. Guides for switching

Only in its own container, never in the photos beyond what you write into them:

• Thumbnails, to open folders fast (Settings ▸ Cache ▸ Clear Cache).
• Undo history: each change with the text before and after, so ⌘Z works after quitting; kept 1 week to 1 year (Settings ▸ General).
• Export history: what went where and when (the Export pane, the sent marks in the grid).
• Import history: which card files went to which folders, so a card isn’t imported twice.
• Your own work: the manual order of photos in a folder, templates, export presets, watermark images, recent folders (File ▸ Open Recent ▸ Clear Menu).

Both histories can be cleared in Settings ▸ Cache, also each time you quit (“Clear when quitting”: on for exports, off for imports).

Very likely. Eikonaut shows the full-size JPEG preview that almost every camera embeds in its RAW files, so new models of existing formats (NEF, CR3, ARW, RAF, ORF, DNG) work at once.

RAW files are never modified: metadata goes into an XMP sidecar.

No. It crops and resizes on export. For anything else, File ▸ Open in External Editor (⇧⌘E) hands the photo to the editor you chose in Settings; for a RAW and JPG pair, the RAW.

Yes: lossless, 8 or 16 bit, with all caption fields embedded.

Yes: rating, caption fields and templates go into the TIFF itself, as with JPG. The image data is never touched.

Yes, on export, never on the originals: a line of text (your Copyright field by default) or the text on a band, a large ©, or your logo as a PNG, with font, position, size and opacity per export preset. The preview shows it on your photo before you export.

The crop is stored in the photo’s XMP, the way Adobe Camera Raw records one; the photo itself is never cut. Apps that read Camera Raw settings show it. Many don’t: Affinity Photo and Nikon NX Studio show the whole photo, and Adobe Bridge shows the crop only when Camera Raw is installed (checked 15 October 2026).

To send a cropped photo, export it: the exported JPG or TIFF is cropped for everyone.

Yes, with macOS Dictation: turn it on in System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ Dictation, click into a caption field and press the dictation shortcut shown there (🎤 on most keyboards), or choose Edit ▸ Start Dictation. Say “comma” or “new line” for punctuation.

On Macs with Apple silicon, Dictation runs on the Mac itself for many languages (English, German, French, Italian and more), without an internet connection; for other languages, macOS sends what you say to Apple.

Inside the file, in standard blocks that every photo program reads:

• EXIF, written by the camera: date and time, camera and lens, exposure, often the GPS position.
• IPTC, the press standard for what you write: caption, headline, keywords, creator, copyright, city and country. It exists twice, in the old IIM block that many agency systems read and in XMP; in JPG and TIFF, Eikonaut always writes both.
• XMP, an open format for everything else: rating, colour label, crop, and the IPTC fields again.
• Sidecar: RAW files, videos and images other than JPG and TIFF are never changed, so their caption goes into an .xmp file with the same name next to them, as other photo apps do.
• C2PA Content Credentials: a signed record of where a picture comes from and what was done to it. An image from an AI generator often carries one saying so, and IPTC has a field for the same (Digital Source Type); Eikonaut shows both marks. Whether a signature checks out only a C2PA verifier can tell, such as contentcredentials.org/verify. Any edit or export removes or invalidates the credentials; the IPTC field stays unless someone clears it.

Yes, through Spotlight: macOS indexes the caption, headline, keywords, creator, copyright and GPS position of photos in every folder it indexes, whichever app wrote them. For an embargoed shoot, add its folder or drive to System Settings ▸ Spotlight ▸ Search Privacy. Eikonaut itself sends nothing anywhere.

Yes: pause the clip in full screen and press S. The frame is saved as a TIFF next to the clip, at full resolution, with the clip’s capture time (plus the frame’s place in it), location and caption.

Yes: press T in full screen, drag the ends of the trim bar, press Return. The part you keep is saved as a new clip next to the original, copied without re-encoding: same quality, done in a moment. It keeps the clip’s location and caption and gets the time of its first frame. The original is never changed.

No. Stars and captions for a clip go into a sidecar next to it.

No. Eikonaut uses no AI and creates nothing by itself: crop and export only take pixels away (a watermark only if you add one), and a caption changes only when you change it. Text tools that macOS adds to Eikonaut’s fields to change your words stay off until you turn them on in Settings ▸ General.

Tools outside Eikonaut are your decision; we think each should be one you choose to switch on. Captions are standard IPTC in the photos, so any tool you choose can read them, and it may send what it reads to its maker. News agencies set their own rules for AI; the EU’s are in the AI Act.

Yes: the IPTC fields Data Mining (“Prohibited for AI/ML training”, “Prohibited for generative AI/ML training” and the other values of the standard) and Digital Source Type (“Digital capture”, “Scanned from a negative”, “Edited with generative AI” …), chosen from a list in the inspector and in templates. They are read by any tool that follows IPTC; whether a crawler respects them is up to the crawler.

Dragged photos open a tab the way Finder opens a folder: by spring-loading. How long Eikonaut waits is set in System Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Pointer Control ▸ Spring-loading speed (the fastest setting works well).

With spring-loading off, a tab doesn’t open under the pointer: drop on the other window instead, or use Edit ▸ Copy (⌘C) and Paste (⌘V).

Often the position in the file isn’t from GPS. Many phones, Android ones especially, take it from the mobile network or Wi-Fi when there is no GPS fix, which can be hundreds of metres or a few kilometres off.

When the file says where its position comes from, Eikonaut shows it under the position in the inspector (“from network”, “± 1200 m”). The position is shown as recorded; Eikonaut doesn’t change it.

That’s a photo dated only by month, such as a scan from “June 1987”. Eikonaut writes such a date as the standards define it: “1987-06” in XMP and “19870600” in IPTC (00 for a day that isn’t known). Bridge reads that as day 0 of June and shows 31 May 1987.

Your file is correct, but don’t save that photo in Bridge’s metadata panel, or 31 May may be written into the file.