Eidetic

Your photo library, reimagined as a living art installation.

Eidetic turns the photos you already have into ambient art — cycling through creative visual modes that make you stop and look again. Editorial magazine spreads, color-sorted galleries, time-travel comparisons, and more. Always on, always beautiful, always surprising.

macOS today · iPad, Apple TV, and screensaver on the roadmap.

---

Why

Most of your photos live in the dark — buried in a library you scroll past once and never open again. Eidetic is the opposite of a slideshow: it's background art designed to be left running. Slow, gentle transitions. Gallery-wall typography. Every photo gets its moment. It's the thing playing on the screen in the corner of the room that makes a guest ask "wait — is that your photos?"

Display Modes

Mode	What it does
Magazine Spread	Editorial layout — a metadata placard beside a hero photo with a slow Ken Burns drift. Eight randomized drift patterns so no two spreads feel alike.
Split Timeline	The same calendar day across different years, side by side. When there's no match for today, it gracefully falls back to pairs from different years so it always shows something.
Color Sort	Every photo sorted into a flowing strip by hue, over a gradient that shifts with the spectrum. Scroll speed scales to your library so it's contemplative, never dizzying.

…with 15 more modes on the roadmap — kaleidoscope, photo wall, polaroid drop, face clusters, depth-based parallax, and weather-driven selection among them.

Design Principles

• Ambient, not attention-demanding. 1.5s+ crossfades, gentle motion. This is art, not a presentation.
• Dark-first. Black backgrounds, white typography — the app disappears so the photos shine.
• Every photo gets its moment. A minimum of seconds on screen; nothing whips by unseen.
• 10 photos or 10,000. It looks great either way, and memory stays flat regardless of library size.
• No chrome. Controls fade in on hover and disappear. Full screen is the default.

Built With

100% Apple frameworks, zero third-party dependencies.

• SwiftUI — shared UI across every target
• PhotoKit (PHCachingImageManager) — reads your library in place; photos are never copied
• Core Image (CIAreaAverage) — dominant-color analysis, cached to disk so re-launches are instant
• ProcessInfo activity assertions — keeps the display awake while running

How it scales

Eidetic tracks your entire library but holds at most a few hundred decoded images in memory at once (LRU eviction), loading each photo on demand as a mode needs it. The only thing written to disk is a tiny color cache — six numbers per photo — so a 50,000-photo library produces a cache measured in single-digit megabytes. Your photos stay exactly where they are.

Getting Started

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) and Xcode 16.

git clone https://github.com/alexander-bain/eidetic.git
cd eidetic
open Package.swift   # then set the run destination to "My Mac" and hit Run

On first launch, grant Photos access. The first batch of photos appears almost immediately while the rest of the library analyzes in the background.

Command-line type-check:

xcrun swiftc -typecheck -sdk $(xcrun --show-sdk-path) \
  -target arm64-apple-macosx14.0 Sources/**/*.swift

Controls

Key	Action
F	Toggle full screen
→	Skip to next mode
Space	Toggle keep-awake
⌘P	Play / Pause
⌘,	Settings

Roadmap

Eidetic is built in phases — see docs/roadmap.md for the full plan. Phase 1 (a solid, polished Mac app) is complete; Phase 2 expands the mode catalog to all 18, and Phase 3 brings iPad, Apple TV, and a Mac screensaver.

License

MIT © 2026 Alex Bain. You're welcome to learn from and build on this code — please keep the attribution.