The catalog
9 features ship on Free. 24 more come with Plus. Filter by area or by tier; every entry is plain English with the engine work it leans on, verified against the canonical docs and the current code.
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.
Nine App Intents cover Shuffle, page navigation, play/pause, grid size, Present mode, Blackout, Freeze, and Switch Persona. Chain flexGrid with the rest of your Mac in Shortcuts.app, or just ask Siri.
Frame the whole grid with up to 100pt of adjustable padding for a gallery look (Free). Hide every toolbar with Cmd+Shift+I for a clean, image-first display (Plus). It stops looking like software and starts looking like you meant it.
Browse and jump through subfolders without leaving the grid. Breadcrumbs and click-to-open routes through the same library state as the main view — no second window, no kiosk-mode trap-door.
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.
One Smart mode. A small decision tree decides for each cell, every frame: if the aspect matches, fit it; otherwise look for a salient subject and frame around it; otherwise fall back to a clean center crop. The cell stays composed when the playhead moves. Tightness slider and Top/Center/Bottom anchor when you want it.
On-device natural-language captions and tags via Apple's FoundationModels — macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence required. Your Mac writes the notes. Nothing leaves the device. You stop pretending you'll remember the file by its name.
Click the scissors on any cell and Vision lifts the subject above the grid borders. The composite floats over the layout — for a thumbnail-style hero, a still-life pose, or a magic-layer transition into Editorial templates.
Auto-curated chips on the empty state — Quiet Reflections · Faces & Portraits · This Year · Recent Additions — scoped to the current folder. One click loads the collection as a grid.
Hover any cell and press P to pick it. Cmd+⌥+M opens Moments — every pick, snapshot, and saved wall in one drawer with Cmd+1–9 to recall instantly. Filter the grid to just your picks; clear them with one confirmation.
Stack up to six items in a single grid slot — vertical or horizontal — and the cell cycles through them with the same gapless playback as a single clip. More content, fewer cells, no extra UI for what's effectively a sub-grid.
A human-readable markup for custom grid layouts. Edit on the left, live preview on the right, save as a `.flexlayout` file. Share layouts with someone else's Mac and the file is the document.
Visual split-and-merge editing for grid cells with built-in presets to start from. Drag, divide, combine — exactly the table-like grid you're picturing, in the number of clicks you'd expect.
Give any cell its own timer with a visible progress ring. When it finishes, the grid can advance, shuffle, recall a Moment, or black out. Stage management for people who prefer not to look like they're stage managing.
A Raycast-style overlay over every command in the app — grid size, layout, shuffle, blackout, presets, Moments, presentations. Tier-gated commands route to a friendly paywall instead of a dead end.
One shortcut combines Paneless mode, auto-advance, and clean transitions for an immediate, screen-fits gallery. Hit it during a meeting and the wall takes over without anybody asking who pressed something.
A reader pane next to the grid — four fonts, eight sizes, three themes. Notes alongside a presentation, a reference next to a review session, a chapter open on the porch while the wall does its thing.
Frame-accurate clip ranges per cell, plus a clean dissolve or fade between media. The grid stops being a folder dump and starts being something you composed.
Capture the current grid as a PNG. Export the canvas with transparency. Same fidelity as the screen — full pipeline if the cells are using filters or branding overlays.
Drag any cell straight to Finder, Mail, Messages, or the Desktop. flexGrid serves the original file via NSFilePromiseProvider — no temp copy, no quality hit, no need to remember where the file lived.
Right-click any image cell and send it to your Mac's wallpaper. Per-display, per-Space. The same image will sit there waiting for you the next time you log in.
Opt in and flexGrid indexes your collections to macOS Spotlight — filenames, AI captions, scene labels, mood tags. Finding a clip from Spotlight opens flexGrid via a `flexgrid://` deep link, on the right grid, with the right tile already selected.
Optional real-time overlay for FPS, memory, and GPU. Mostly for the people who like to watch the numbers; secretly useful when you want to know which folder is hot.
flexGrid v1 ships with Free and Plus only. The features in the queue (SmartFlex, Canvas, Masonry, Mood matching, Lava Lamp) are listed on the roadmap below.
A few features that were mothballed earlier in v1 have returned with new names and calmer internals. They show up here so the difference is on the record.
Returned in 1.1 (May 2026). What was originally Masonry is now Editorial Layout: 14 curated templates, 2–6 cells, Vision-aware hero placement, density knob, structure lock-and-cycle.
The six framing modes from earlier builds (Fill to Face / Torso / Person / Body) collapsed into one Smart mode with a per-cell decision tree, a framing-tightness slider, and a Top/Center/Bottom anchor.
The original Folder Browse kiosk mode was replaced by the Folder Tree side panel — same job, calmer surface, doesn't fight the rest of the layout system for the wheel.
v1 prioritises rock-solid loading and playback. A few features arrived wearing too much jewelry, so they're mothballed until they deserve their entrance music. No dates.
Blank-cell collage builder with per-cell drag-and-drop. Still shelved for v1; the underlying split/merge work lives on as Grid Designer until Canvas is ready to come back on a calmer engine.
Retired (not coming back)
No roadmap dates. We ship when it's ready, not when the internet gets fidgety.
Where it doesn't fit
flexGrid plays your folder as a wall. The cuts, the keying, the live mix — those tools stay where you put them, and flexGrid stays where it earns its keep.
A short closing remark
You can keep scrolling, or you can drop a folder in and see what the engine actually does.