Eikonaut

Features

What Eikonaut does, in the order of the work: import, pick, caption, deliver.

Import from a card

  • Copies to a working folder and a backup drive at the same time.
  • Every copy read back and compared before it gets its name.
  • Rename and apply a template on the way in. Nothing is written on the card.
  • Keep the card’s folders, a folder per job, or rename them, e.g. {date:yyyy-MM-dd} {folder}.
The import dialog over the grid: from a camera card to a working folder and a backup drive, with renaming.
Import from a card, with backup and renaming.

Pick

  • 1–5 stars with one key, written into the file at once.
  • Colour labels with ⌘1–⌘8, named as you like, shown as a dot in the grid.
  • Lock a photo; filter by stars, label or locked.
  • The camera’s voice memo plays with its photo (V) and stays with it when you rename or move it.
  • Find by any field or date; replace text across captions.
  • Open the pick in your photo editor with one shortcut.
A football photo in full screen, a player leaping over the sliding goalkeeper, with file name, position 4 of 9, two stars and the caption.
Full screen: file name, position, stars and caption.
A man in a red cap leans into a black Hérens cow with both arms, holding it back, in front of a full grandstand.
Cow fightingA beater holds back a cow at the annual cow fights on May 6, 2012 in Aproz in the Alpine Canton of Valais, Switzerland. Photo: Lukas Spieker

Caption

  • Every IPTC Core field and the important Extension fields, in one inspector.
  • Templates for what repeats; copy and paste metadata between photos.
  • Variables in every text: {city}, {date}, {headline}, {seq} and more, the same in captions, file names and export.
  • Mark photos “not for AI training” (IPTC Data Mining).
  • Correct the capture time; the camera’s original time is kept.
  • Rename a photo in place: double-click its name in the inspector.
The Templates window: a list of templates, and for each field a checkbox, the text and how it is applied.
Caption fields and templates.

Export and deliver

  • Presets: JPG or TIFF, size, sRGB or Adobe RGB, file name, leave out GPS.
  • Crop without touching the original; lossless rotation.
  • Visible watermark: text, text on a band, a large ©, or your logo.
  • An export queue with log, pause and “Export again”.
  • Your own upload script (SFTP, FTP, rclone) runs after the export.
The export sheet: a JPG preset with the copyright as a watermark on a band, previewed on a photo of a man at a salt lake.
An export preset with a watermark on a band.
Two men push a wooden cargo bicycle piled with sacks up a dirt road; a volcano rises behind green hills.
Cargo bicyclesMen push a heavily loaded cargo bicycle uphill on the road in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the background is Mount Mikeno, an extinct volcano of the Virunga mountain chain. April 13, 2016. Photo: Lukas Spieker

Open and browse

  • Open any folder: on your Mac, a card, an external drive, the NAS, a cloud folder. It updates live while a card copies.
  • JPG, TIFF, RAW (NEF, CR2, CR3, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, PEF, DNG), HEIC, HEIF, AVIF, PNG, WebP, GIF, PSD and video in one grid.
  • RAW and JPG pairs, or RAW and HEIF, shown as one photo.
  • Full screen, 1:1 view, a frame around the photo if you like.
  • Light, dark or your own colours for background, tiles and text, e.g. a neutral grey that adds no colour next to the photos. All windows can take the background colour.
  • The selection framed in grey, the system colour, chinagraph red as on a contact sheet, or any colour; the tile’s colour kept if you like.
  • Sort by name, capture time, rating, label or your own order.
  • Copy or move photos to another folder: drag them onto a tab, or choose Copy To or Move To (⌃⌘C, ⌃⌘M for the last folder), or New Folder with Selection. RAW, JPG, sidecar and voice memo go together, verified, and can be undone.
Eikonaut’s window: a grid of photos with their stars, and the caption inspector.
The grid and the inspector.

Video

  • Thumbnails, playback, stars and captions (in a sidecar; the clip is never changed).
  • Trim a clip without re-encoding: the part you keep becomes a new clip with its date, place and caption; the original is never changed.
  • Save any frame as a full-size still with the clip’s time, place and caption.
A drone clip of islands and a sailing boat, playing in full screen; below it the file name, position 221 of 608, length, HEVC and 3840×2160.
Full screen: a clip with its length, codec and size.
A diver swims along the deck of a sunken tugboat in deep blue water, small fish around the hull.
UnderwaterThe wreck of the tugboat El Peñon sits on the ground in 32 metres depth in Tabaiba, Tenerife. Photo: Lukas Spieker

Safe by design

  • Every metadata write is read back and checked before it counts.
  • RAW, video, HEIC, AVIF, PNG, WebP, GIF and PSD files are never modified: their metadata goes into an XMP sidecar.
  • Undo for every change, also after a restart.
  • No account, no cloud, no tracking. The app goes online only when your upload script does.
  • No AI. Crop and export only take pixels away, a watermark only if you add one; macOS’s text tools stay off in its fields until you turn them on.
Two riders climb a narrow road lined with spectators; a man in a green costume runs beside them.
Tour de FranceLuis-Leon Sanchez of team Rabobank and Peter Sagan of team Liquigas climb the Mur de Péguère pass in the Pyrenees during the 14th stage of the 99th Tour de France cycling race between Limoux and Foix, July 15, 2012. Photo: Lukas Spieker