flexGrid is a native macOS multi-video grid player. Drop any folder onto the window and the cultivated first batch is playing in about a second and a half — even on a folder of twenty-five thousand files. Up to nine cells on Free, sixteen on Plus, and an entire engine quietly making sure none of them stutter.
flexGrid's scanner is progressive. You don't sit through a loading bar. The cultivated first batch fires in about a second and a half, even on a folder of twenty-five thousand files. The rest streams in behind it — the way it should have always worked.
Naïve looping seeks back to frame zero. The decoder catches up, the player blinks, the audio clicks. You stop noticing it; you never stop seeing it.
AVPlayerLooper keeps a second media replica running across the loop boundary. There's no seek, no rebuffer, no flash. The seam isn't fixed — it isn't there.
The whole engine ships in Free — nine cells, gapless loops, borrowed-player fullscreen, Siri & Shortcuts, the Folder Tree side panel, the persona picker, the time-aware greeting. No watermark, no fourteen-day flirt, no "Plus required" sneer hidden behind a checkbox.
Six cards on your first run — Visual Creator, Home Ambience, Photographer, Educator, Media Explorer, Art Installation. Pick one and flexGrid sets the grid size, the loop behaviour, and the playback defaults to match. You can switch personas any time, or ask Siri to switch you.
Drop any folder onto the window — one tile, four tiles, up to nine on Free. The cultivated first batch is on screen and playing in about a second and a half, even on a folder of 25,000 files. The rest streams in behind it. No loading bar. No project file. No mascot.
Naïve looping seeks the player back to frame zero, which produces a tiny black flash and an audio click every time. flexGrid uses AVPlayerLooper under every cell, with a second media replica running across the loop boundary. The seam is gone — you literally cannot see it happen.
Click any tile and the fullscreen overlay borrows the player that was already running in the cell. No rebuffer, no poster frame, no spinner. Transport bar with scrubber, ±10s skip, volume that survives across sessions, three ways out (collapse, click-outside, ESC).
A separate audio track for the room — MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, AAC — or one toggle to unmute every video at once. The simultaneous-audio toggle is off by default; the cacophony warning is real. Volume persists across sessions.
Dynamic Liquid Glass UI on macOS 26 with accent-color palettes. On macOS 15 (Sequoia), the same panels gracefully fall back to a calmer treatment. Same app from one source — no Electron, no web wrapper.
Fourteen curated templates. Two to six cells. Vision-aware hero placement. Density knob. Structure lock-and-cycle on auto-advance. The folder reads like a spread you laid out on purpose — because the engine just did.
Editorial Layout · Plus
Fourteen curated templates. Two to six cells. Vision-aware hero placement. A density knob to trade calm for variety. Lock the structure and let auto-advance cycle the contents inside it.
Landscape window. One hero cell, three supporting frames stacked.
Plus is a one-time purchase — no subscription, no membership cult. The grid grows to 4×4, SmartShuffle deals every item before any repeat, Vision tags filter by what's actually in the frame, and Smart cell display reframes each cell around the moment.
Plus unlocks twelve- and sixteen-tile grids (up to 4×4) and lifts every limit. A folder of two photos still works. A folder of fifty thousand also works.
Fourteen curated templates with two to six cells: hero plus supporting frames, mosaic spreads, magazine-style grids. Vision-aware slot assignment picks the right hero. A density knob (2–6 cells) trades calm for variety. Lock the structure and let auto-advance cycle the contents inside it.
Three content-aware layout buttons. flexGrid reads your media's aspect ratios — portrait, landscape, mixed — and recommends Portrait Gallery, Landscape Theater, or Uniform Stack. Click the one that fits the room you're in.
Cells prefer matching aspect ratios when filling, in two strengths — Preferred (suggests; can mix) or Strict (only ever a perfect fit). Per-cell or grid-wide. Photos stop landing in places where they had to be pillarboxed within an inch of their lives.
Treats your library like a competent card dealer. Every item gets dealt before any repeat (bag-draw), and the deck stays balanced across folder source, aspect, duration, kind, and a sliding window of what just played. The result feels hand-curated because the math is doing the curating.
Filter by what's actually in the frame — faces, bodies, text, animals, scenes, brightness, monochrome, horizon tilt, blur or smudge, letterbox bands, composite detection, even feature-print similarity. The Vision framework does the work on-device. A status-bar pill shows analysis progress without nagging.
Every candidate is scored against a sliding window of what just played — kind, aspect, source folder, date, duration — and bag-drawn so every item plays before any repeat. The radar at right is that scoring, animated. The highlighted axis is whichever dimension is currently the most decisive.
Per cell, every frame: if the aspect matches, fit. If Vision finds a subject, frame around it. If a center crop is safe, take it. If none of that works, zoom out so the edges stay visible. A tightness slider and a Top / Center / Bottom anchor handle the rest.
Per-cell, every frame
Tightness slider and Top / Center / Bottom anchor when you want the framing nudged further. Otherwise the cell sorts itself out.
SwiftUI for the surface, AVFoundation for every player, Vision for fourteen on-device detectors, FoundationModels for AI captions on Apple Intelligence, and the Mach kernel for memory pressure. Not bolted on. Made of.
In one sentence
Every scanned photo is handed to one
VNImageRequestHandler
that fans out to fourteen concurrent detectors;
while those run, a single
CGContext
render of the same image feeds four pixel-domain
analyses on a shared RGBA buffer.
That's how the wall stays cool while the library walks itself through your Mac's on-device intelligence.
A dozen specific decisions about how to play sixteen videos at once on a Mac without setting it on fire. Mostly invisible. Quietly the entire point.
The scanner runs progressively. A cultivated first batch lands in ~1.5 seconds even on a folder of 25,000 files, and the rest streams in behind it. Instant playback isn't gated on scanning being done.
You don't sit through a loading bar. Drop the folder, the grid plays, the library catches up underneath.
Every cell uses AVPlayerLooper, which keeps a second media replica running across the loop boundary. No seek, no buffer, no black flash.
Looping a video most places gives you a tiny stutter you stop noticing. Here, you literally cannot see it happen.
Click a tile and the fullscreen overlay borrows the player that was already running in the cell. The same engine just changes where it's drawing — implemented as an in-window ZStack overlay, not a system panel.
No rebuffer, no poster frame, no spinner. The grid keeps its place. You walk away and back.
MemoryMonitor pulls live numbers straight from the Mach kernel: task_info for resident memory, thread_info for per-thread CPU. The same data Activity Monitor uses.
flexGrid tunes itself across four graduated tiers — Normal, Elevated, High, Critical — trimming caches, recycling off-screen players, and skipping the pricey stuff. You don't have to babysit a settings panel.
A PlayerPool keeps a small set of media players warm and recycles them across cells. When a tile changes content, the least-recently-used off-screen player has its URL swapped in — same engine, new file, no setup cost.
Spinning up a fresh AVPlayer drags a whole decode pipeline behind it. Recycling is why a sixteen-tile grid feels like four.
Every scanned file's metadata persists across launches — aspect ratio, duration, codec, frame rate, Vision tags, saliency rectangles, pixel dimensions. Change detection compares (fileSize, dateModified) and only re-reads what actually changed.
Big folders that took seconds the first time load in milliseconds the next. The library remembers itself.
None of these are flagship features on their own. The flagship is that you don't have to know about any of them.
docs/HELP_AND_PROMOTIONAL_MATERIALS.md
Smart Layout Presets reads your folder's aspect ratios and picks Portrait Gallery, Landscape Theater, or Uniform Stack. Auto-Advance turns the timer up. Paneless mode hides every toolbar. The wall runs itself; you go make coffee.
Editorial Layout finds the hero, places the supporting cells, and locks the structure. Auto-advance keeps the templates and just cycles the contents. The folder reads like a magazine.
Sixteen frames at once. Lock the keepers. Pick the maybes with P. Moments collects everything for the review pass, ⌘1–9 jumps you back to any saved wall, and a collage export ends the meeting on a clean PNG.
Countdowns, clocks, auto-advance, and a grid that keeps itself together without needing an intern or a sacrificial browser tab. Pick a persona and the defaults are already right.
Scenes saved as Moments, the side pane open to your notes, Present mode (⌘⇧↩) cleans the chrome, and the Command Palette is two keys away. It looks less like a slideshow and more like you planned your life.
Vision tags filter the grid to faces, brightness, or scenes. Smart cell display reframes each one around the subject. Subject Cutout floats the keepers above the layout. Then export the contact sheet, on transparent PNG, for the file you'll never name correctly.
Pricing
No subscriptions, no membership cult, no little renewal email arriving at 4:12 a.m.
One app. The upgrade unlocks features in place — no separate download, no migration.
In the margin
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon or any Intel Mac with Metal. Liquid Glass UI, Smart Captions, Subject Cutout, and the on-device AI features want macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence. Everything else is less emotionally needy.
No. There is no sign-in screen because there is no sign-in cult. No accounts, no sync, no analytics, no network calls for features. Your Mac already knows enough about you.
Absolutely not. Free is a real tier, not a bread crumb trail. Plus is a one-time purchase through StoreKit 2 — price set at launch. You buy it once and then everyone can go lie down.
Free is a fully functional multi-video grid player — drop a folder, play up to nine tiles, shuffle, lock, loop, go fullscreen, automate with Siri & Shortcuts, all of it. Plus unlocks bigger grids (up to sixteen), Editorial Layout, SmartShuffle, on-device Vision tags, Smart cell display, Smart Captions, Subject Cutout, Smart Collections, Moments, Command Palette, Present mode, FlexLayout editor, Grid Designer, PNG/collage export, Drag OUT, Spotlight indexing, and the unlimited-everything caps.
Video: MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, MKV. Images: JPG, PNG, HEIC, GIF, TIFF, WebP. Background audio: MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, AAC. ePub and PDF in the side pane. RAW images aren't in v1. If your Mac can play it, flexGrid can usually turn it into a wall.
apps.pixelantern.com is the studio surface for everything pixeLantern makes. flexgrid.pixelantern.com is just for flexGrid — more room to show what the app actually does, including an Experience page that's the closest thing to running it without a Mac in front of you.
An invitation
The TestFlight beta is free while we polish the launch build. You'll know within a minute whether flexGrid is your thing — which is more than most software relationships will offer you in the first year.