A visual library · macOS & iOS App
What catches your eye, kept close.
I built Ambrel for the references that get lost between screenshots, copied images and browser tabs. A shortcut saves them with their source. Your Mac reads their text, extracts their colours and finds similar images, so you can get back to what you saw even when you cannot remember where it was.
Real captures of Ambrel, with the same library of eighteen visual references throughout. Scroll to explore it, specimen by specimen. Further down, the new iPhone and iPad app and how the library syncs.
Capture a region, save a copied image or keep a link. The quick-save panel lets you choose a board and tags without opening the library. Your usual macOS screenshots can be picked up from the menu bar too.
Search for 1926: Ambrel finds the poster because it reads the text inside the image. Titles, sources and recognised subjects are searchable too, even if you never added a tag.
Choose up to three colours, enter a hex value or use the eyedropper anywhere on screen. Ambrel puts the references where those colours stand out first, across boards and subjects.
A reference can be the search itself. Ask for similar images and Ambrel compares it with the whole library. Follow the visual connection between references without having to name or tag what they share.
Open a capture to see its source, board, tags, recognised text and palette together. Copy the text, search by a colour or return to the original website without losing the reference.
Text recognition, colour analysis and visual similarity all run on your Mac. The library is local and needs no account. iCloud sync is optional. Screenshots are stored as HEIC to keep the collection small.
The small window is only the visible part. Capturing, understanding and retrieving a reference each use a different part of the system.
SwiftUI and AppKit bring together the library, global shortcuts and the menu-bar quick-save panel. Saving a reference fits into the work already on screen.
Apple’s Vision framework reads text, recognises subjects and produces the visual fingerprints used to compare images. The analysis happens on the device.
Images live in a local library, with SQLite keeping their metadata and image analysis. HEIC reduces the space taken by screenshots while their source stays attached.
Ambrel 1.3 adds a free companion app for iPhone and iPad. It brings over the library you keep on your Mac through your own iCloud account: the inbox, the boards you choose and your saved searches. It saves images and links from any app’s Share button, and on iPad you can edit a board’s canvas.
It uses no system menus. Every action lives in floating glass bars that change with what you select, in a sheet of its own or in a bubble on the canvas, and a board opens by zooming out of the card you tapped. The aim was for it to feel as considered as the Mac app.
Real screenshots from the iOS simulator, using the sample library that ships with the app so it can be tried without a Mac.
On the Mac, a library is a folder holding a SQLite database, the originals and the thumbnails, with indexes kept in memory. Taking it to iCloud could not mean rebuilding the app around another store, losing captures in a conflict or filling a phone with gigabytes of originals. These were the decisions.
No migration to Core Data or SwiftData: the store, the searches and the indexes stay as they were, and sync is a layer that reads and writes rows. Nor the library folder in iCloud Drive, which syncs file by file and corrupts a database in WAL mode. The data lives in the private CloudKit database of the user’s own account, with no server of mine in between.
SQLite triggers record every row that changes and which groups of fields changed, so no write path, undo included, can forget to sync. The record is built when it is sent, from the row as it is at that moment, and changes from iCloud are applied with the triggers silenced so they do not bounce back.
If CloudKit rejects a save because the record changed elsewhere, the app takes the server’s version, reapplies only the fields this device changed and sends it again. A batch from another device that would delete more than 50 captures and a fifth of the library pauses sync, and the Mac asks first. Deleted files go to the Trash.
Sync is switched on per library and no board syncs by default: you choose them on the Mac. Each library has two zones, one for metadata and thumbnails and another for originals. The Mac downloads both, while the iPhone asks for an original only when you open, share or export it, and keeps a small cache.
An iOS share extension gets about 120 MB of memory, too little to decode a large PNG. Images are copied to the shared container for the app to process later, but links go up to CloudKit from the extension itself, with their title, author and a single cover frame, never the video. Each link has its ID from the moment the sheet opens, so it is never saved twice.
The iOS app is free and sells nothing. Each Mac publishes its signed licence token (Ed25519) to the iCloud account, and the iPhone verifies it with the same public keys: with a valid licence or trial it can save, and without one it is read-only, as on the Mac. Each library is tied to a single iCloud account.
