Muse

Muse is a native Mac app for collecting and organising the things you find online: images and screenshots, links and bookmarks, video, and notes. Everything lives in one private library made of real files on your own Mac, with no account and no cloud. Save something with a drag, a shortcut, or the browser clipper, and Muse tidies it away and tags it for you on-device, so you can find it again later by a word, a colour, or even the text inside a screenshot.

Muse needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later and an Apple Silicon Mac (the M1, M2, M3 and M4 family). It is a notarised app that installs like any other: download it from theodorehq.com/muse, drag it to your Applications folder, and open it. Updates arrive automatically. Muse is not sandboxed and is not on the Mac App Store, which is what lets it capture from anywhere on your screen and keep its files where you can see them. Muse does not run on older Intel Macs.

Download Muse from theodorehq.com/muse, open the disk image, and drag Muse into your Applications folder. The first time you open it, right-click the app and choose Open so macOS lets a freshly downloaded app run. Muse starts your 30-day free trial straight away, with no card needed. It opens to a near-empty library and one gentle prompt: drag anything in, or press the capture shortcut, and you are collecting.

Yes. Muse comes with a full 30-day free trial, and you do not need to enter any card or payment details to start it. Every feature is available during the trial, so you can build a real library and see how it fits your work. When the trial ends, buying a licence unlocks the same library you already built. Nothing you saved is lost or held back.

No. Muse has no account and no sign-in. You download the app and start using it, and your library lives entirely on your Mac as real files. When you buy, you activate a licence key (which arrives by email from our checkout), but that is a one-time step, not an account you log into. There is no password to remember and nothing syncing to a server.

The quickest way is to drag an image, a file, or a link straight onto the Muse window. You can also press the capture shortcut from anywhere: the Launcher opens with Cmd-Shift-K, or grab a screenshot into Muse with Cmd-Shift-S. However you save, a small Capture Card appears with a title, a collection, and tags already filled in. Press Cmd-Return to save, and the item lands in your library.

Muse gives you five ways to collect. Drag anything anywhere on your Mac and the Drop Ring appears to catch it. Use the browser extension to right-click and save an image, link or whole page, or point the in-page clipper at what you want. Press Cmd-Shift-S for a screenshot straight into the library. Open the Launcher with Cmd-Shift-K to search, save or paste from any app. All of the shortcuts can be changed in Settings.

From version 1.0.19 Muse can do this for you. Open Settings → Library → Change, pick where you want the library, and Muse copies everything across, checks the copy is complete before it switches over, and restarts into it. Your old folder is left exactly as it was. That is also how you point Muse at a library you have already carried over: choose the folder it is in and Muse opens it rather than copying anything.

If you would rather do it by hand, or you are on an older version, it is a plain folder copy. Your whole library is a single self-contained folder, so moving Macs is a copy rather than an import. By default it lives in your Pictures folder and is called Muse Library. Inside it are your original files, in dated folders under their real names, alongside the small database that holds your collections, boards and tags. Settings → Library → Your Files shows the path and has a Reveal button that opens it in Finder.

To move everything over:

1. Quit Muse on the old Mac, so the database is closed and settled.
2. Copy the Muse Library folder to the new Mac, by AirDrop, an external drive, or whichever way you prefer.
3. Put it in the same place, inside Pictures, and open Muse. It picks up exactly where you left off.

If you would rather keep it somewhere else, put it wherever you like and open Muse. When it cannot find a library it asks you to point at the folder, and everything comes back once you do.

Two things in Settings help here. Backup keeps scheduled copies in a folder you choose, and one of those is often the easiest thing to carry across. Export a Copy writes a plain version organised into folders by board, with real filenames, links as double-clickable .webloc files and notes as .txt, which is useful if you want a copy that does not need Muse at all.

Your licence covers up to three Macs, so activating on the new one does not cost you the old one. See "How do I move my licence to a new Mac?" if you want to free a slot.

Post it on this Support Centre. Report a Bug and Request a Feature are both here, they take no account and no email, and every post is read.

Muse asks for no email address and never phones home, so a post here is genuinely the only way something reaches us. If a bug is stopping you buying, or there is one feature you are waiting on, say so plainly: that is the most useful thing anyone sends us, and it is what decides what gets built next.

Three ways in, all the same place:

1. From Muse: the Help menu lists Report a Bug, Request a Feature, Review Roadmap and the rest.
2. From Settings: open Settings → Support for the same list with a line of description under each.
3. From here: the sections at the top of this Support Centre.

Leave an email address when you post and you will get our replies by email. Leave it out and the post is completely anonymous; it is read either way.

Review Roadmap shows what is already planned, so it is worth a look before you write: your request may already be on it, and adding a comment to an existing one carries more weight than a second copy of it.

From version 1.0.20, new installs meet all of this during setup, so nobody has to go looking for it.

Press Cmd-Shift-K from any app and the Launcher floats up over whatever you are doing. Type to search your whole library, press Space to preview an item without leaving the Launcher, and drag results straight out into another app. Results are listed in one steady order: your bookmarks, then your collections, then your pictures and video, and a collection whose name you type exactly comes straight to the top. On a collection, Return steps inside it so you can keep browsing without leaving the Launcher, and Command-Return brings Muse to the front with that collection open. You can also reach your Downloads folder from here, and Shift-Return pastes a saved link into the app you were just in. Press Escape and you are back exactly where you started. The shortcut can be changed in Settings.

Every time you capture something, a small frosted card appears with the title, collection and tags already filled in. Tab moves between the fields, and Cmd-Return saves. If you do nothing, it waits patiently rather than dismissing, so reading a page never loses your save. It can even appear before a download finishes and attach itself to the real file once it lands. You can turn the Capture Card off in Settings if you prefer saves to drop straight into your Inbox.

The Muse extension works in Chrome and the Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc and others) and in Firefox 121 or later. There are two ways to clip: right-click and choose Save Image, Video, Link, Selection or Page to Muse, or summon the in-page clipper (hold Option by default), then click whatever lights up. The extension only talks to the Muse app on your own Mac, and the app downloads the media itself. Install it from the links on theodorehq.com/muse.

Press Cmd-Shift-S and Muse starts an interactive screen grab: drag to select a region, or press Space to switch to capturing a whole window. The shot lands directly in your library, and Muse remembers the page or app it came from so the screenshot carries its source. There is no separate save step. You can change the screenshot shortcut, like every other shortcut, in Settings > Shortcuts.

The Drop Ring is Muse's catch-anywhere target. Start dragging any image, file or link anywhere on your Mac, then hold Control, and a small radial dial blooms around your cursor: Inbox at the top, your Downloads folder at the bottom, and your top collections around the ring. Keep holding as you move onto the one you want, and let go to drop. Release Control before you finish and the ring tucks away again, which is what keeps it clear of everyday dragging.

Waiting for a key is how Muse ships, so that moving files around your Mac never summons something you did not ask for. All of it is adjustable in Settings → Muse → Drop Ring:

• Hold to Summon. On by default. Switch it off and the ring appears on every drag, with no key at all.
• Summon Key. Control by default. You can swap it for Command, Option or Shift.
• Show For. Set to every app by default. Switch it to Browsers and the ring only appears for drags that start in a web browser.
• Never Show For. A list of apps whose drags Muse leaves alone entirely. CleanShot X is on it out of the box, so dragging from its screenshot tray behaves as it always did.

The ring only considers drags carrying an image, a file, a link or text, and it ignores anything dragged from inside Muse's own window.

The shelf is an optional tray that lives at the edge of your screen for staging things in and out without opening the main window. It is off by default. Turn it on in Settings, and then summon it with Cmd-Shift-M or by nudging your pointer to the screen edge. It is handy if you like to gather a few things before filing them properly. If you would rather keep it simple, leaving it off changes nothing else about how Muse works.

Collections are your folders, and they nest: a collection can hold sub-collections, shown as neat piles inside it. Every item lives in exactly one collection, so filing something moves it there rather than leaving a copy where it was. If the same thing genuinely belongs in two places, save it twice and give each one its own name, and Muse keeps them as separate entries with their own tags and notes. Anything you have not filed yet waits in the Inbox until you sort it, and an item you take out of a collection simply goes back to being unfiled.

Muse tags your items for you, on your Mac, using Apple's built-in intelligence. Images and video are read by Vision and tagged with what they show, with a colour name as a fallback so nothing is left bare. Links have no picture to read, so they are tagged from their words: the site name and the key nouns in the title. You can always add or remove tags by hand. If you add your own Anthropic API key, Muse can write richer tags with Claude instead.

Press Cmd-K and one search box looks across your whole library at once: titles and notes, your tags, the text found inside images, and more, ranked so the best matches come first. You can also reach it from the Launcher outside the app. Because Muse understands your items in a few different ways, the same box lets you search by a word, by a colour, or by describing what you remember, all covered in the questions below.

Yes. Muse reads the text inside your images and screenshots using Apple's on-device text recognition, and folds that text into search. So if you saved a screenshot of an article, a slide, or a receipt, you can find it later by typing a phrase that appears in the picture, even though you never wrote that phrase down. It all happens on your Mac, with nothing sent anywhere, and it works quietly in the background as you save.

Yes. Muse works out the main colours of every image you save, on-device, so you can type a colour name into search, like teal, mustard or navy, and Muse surfaces the items that match. It is a lovely way to pull a palette together or find that one warm-toned reference you know you kept. Like the rest of Muse's everyday intelligence, colour search runs entirely on your Mac.

Yes. Muse can find images by what they show, not just by their tags, so you can search for something like quiet minimalist kitchen and get matching pictures even if none of those words were ever typed on them. This meaning-based search is powered by a small image model that Muse downloads once (about 300 MB) and then runs fully on your Mac. Give a large new library a little time to finish reading through your images the first time.

Yes, in two ways. Open an item's Info panel and choose Find Similar, and Muse surfaces other items in your own library that look like it, matched on your Mac. Or press V for Muse Vision, which searches the web visually and shows related images in a pane inside Muse, so you can chase an idea further without opening a browser. Find Similar stays entirely on-device; Muse Vision reaches out to the web, so it needs a connection.

Yes. From an image's Info panel, Muse can produce a text prompt describing it, useful for feeding into an image generator. The instant version is composed on your Mac from what Muse already knows about the picture: its colours, its tags, and any text it contains, with nothing sent anywhere. If you add your own Anthropic API key, Muse can send the image to Claude for a richer, reference-grade description. Without a key, you get the instant local version.

Links are first-class in Muse, not an afterthought. Save a page and it becomes a visual card with the site's icon, a clean title, and the page's own preview image when it publishes one. That means your bookmarks look like the things they point to and sit happily beside your images. Muse fetches each link's icon and preview picture once and then keeps them locally, so your saved pages stay recognisable even as the web changes.

Yes. Muse imports from an Eagle library folder, a Raindrop.io CSV export (it also reads Pocket-style and generic CSVs), a Pinterest account export, and browser bookmarks in the universal HTML format that Chrome, Safari, Firefox and others all export. Everything is read from the files you already have, so your existing collections come across with their structure intact. You will find the import options in Settings under Library.

Yes. Turn on the X bookmarks toggle in the extension popup and approve the permission it asks for. Then, as you scroll your own X bookmarks page while signed in, Muse quietly reads the bookmarks your browser is already loading and files them into your library, with photos saved at full resolution. Muse sends nothing to X; it only reads what is already on your screen. To backfill everything, scroll back through your bookmarks page once. It is off until you switch it on.

The Canvas is an infinite, freeform board for laying your collected items out in space: pan around, zoom in and out, and double-click to fly to anything. It is made for arranging and comparing your references, moodboard style, rather than for drawing, so it keeps things calm and uncluttered. When a board is how you want it, you can export the whole thing as a PDF to share or print, and Muse tiles very large boards neatly across pages.

Select any item and press Space to open it large over a softly blurred backdrop tinted to its own colours. Press Space again to fill the whole screen, and Escape to step back to your grid. Video keeps playing the whole way through. It is the quickest way to study a reference without leaving what you were doing, and it works the same in the main window and in the Launcher.

Video is a first-class part of your library, sitting alongside your images. Muse saves it, shows it as a card with a poster frame, and plays it inside the app: press Space to open it and it plays right there, full screen with a second press. Play, pause and scrubbing live on the controls that appear over the video as you move the pointer, and clicking anywhere else closes the preview, the same as it does for an image. Clips you save from the web are downloaded where that is possible, so they keep working even if the original page changes. You can search and tag video just like everything else.

Give any item a star to favourite it: right-click and choose Favourite, or press F with it selected. Your favourites gather in their own Favourites section in the sidebar, so the pieces you keep coming back to are always one click away, whichever collection they live in. Press F again to remove the star. It is a light way to lift your best finds above everything else.

Your whole library lives in a folder called Muse Library, kept by default inside your Pictures folder, as ordinary files you can see. From Settings you can reveal it in Finder any time, and there are your originals in plain folders rather than locked inside a database. You can also move it: Settings, then Library, then Change puts your library on an external drive or anywhere else with more room, which is worth knowing if your startup disk is tight. See "How do I move my library to a new Mac?" for what that does. Because they are real files, your collection is yours to browse, copy and keep, with or without Muse open.

Open Settings and, under Backup, choose a backup folder, ideally one that syncs to the cloud like iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Muse then saves regular snapshots of your library there, keeps as many recent ones as you choose, and can run on a set schedule even when Muse is closed. You can also press Back Up Now at any time. One tip: keep your live library out of a cloud-synced folder, and let the backups live there instead.

A snapshot holds everything a library needs: the database, your originals, the site icons and the preview images for your links. The only thing left out is the grid's thumbnail cache, which Muse rebuilds from your originals, so a restored library is complete without it and the backup stays a good deal smaller.

Yes. Open Settings and choose Export a Copy, and Muse writes a plain, self-explanatory copy of your library to a folder you pick, organised by collection, that makes sense on its own without the app. Together with the fact that your library is already real files on your Mac, it means you are never locked in: your collection is yours to take with you whenever you like.

Muse keeps your library on the Mac it runs on, with no cloud account syncing it between machines, which is part of what keeps it private and fast. Your one licence covers up to three Macs, and each keeps its own local collection, so there is no automatic sync between them today. If you need the same library in two places, your files are plain files you can copy across, and the Backup and Export tools in Settings give you clean copies to work from.

You do not need to worry about saving something twice. When you save a file that is identical to one already in your library, Muse recognises it and quietly merges the two rather than making a second copy. The save still succeeds, and the item simply gains the new source or collection you filed it into. It keeps your library tidy without ever interrupting a capture to ask.

To remove an item, right-click it and choose Delete, or press the Delete key with it selected. It does not vanish: it moves to the Trash, which has its own section in the sidebar, so you can change your mind. Open Trash, right-click an item and choose Restore, and it goes back where it was. Items rest there rather than disappearing. To clear the Trash out for good, right-click Trash in the sidebar and choose Empty Trash, or type "empty trash" into the Cmd K search. Muse asks first, and the files themselves move to your Mac's Trash rather than being destroyed, so they can still be put back from the Finder afterwards. Emptying needs version 1.0.19 or later.

Yes. Open the View As options at the top of the window to switch between a moodboard-style grid of cards and a tidy list, and to adjust things like how many columns you see and what each card shows. The sidebar also has a Types section, so you can jump to just your images, links, video and more with a click. Each view remembers its own settings, so a single collection and your whole library can each look the way that suits it.

Select one item or a hundred, then press M. Muse asks where to file them, you type a few letters of the collection name and press Return. The list names the collection each one sits inside, so two collections sharing a name are easy to tell apart, and you can create a new collection from the same box by typing a name that does not exist yet. Press Escape to back out without filing anything. Every keyboard shortcut Muse listens for is listed in the app if you press the question mark key.

Muse is a one-time purchase of $29. There is no subscription and no yearly fee, and every future update is included at no extra cost. You can try the whole app free for 30 days first, with no card needed, and buy only if it earns a place in your work. It is a deliberately fair, pay-once price in a category full of subscriptions.

When your trial is running or has ended, choose Buy in the app and you are taken to our secure checkout. After paying, you receive a licence key by email that looks like MUSE- followed by a set of characters. To enter it, open Settings, go to About, and choose Enter Key in the Licence section. You can do that at any point, including partway through your trial, so buying early never means waiting. Paste the key, choose Activate, and Muse confirms that it is yours. Your files never change during this; activation simply lifts the trial lock.

Each Muse licence activates up to 3 Macs, and you can manage those devices yourself at any time. Sign in to your Polar account with your purchase email and you will see your licence key and the Macs it is currently active on. Deactivating a Mac you no longer use frees that slot immediately, which is worth knowing if you reinstall macOS or reset your Mac, because a fresh install claims a new slot even on the same machine.

One licence covers up to three Macs, so your desktop and laptop can both run Muse from the same key. If you try to activate a fourth, Muse tells you the key is already on three Macs and points you to deactivate one. Since your library is local to each Mac rather than synced, each machine keeps its own collection.

On the Mac you are moving away from, open Settings > Licence and choose Deactivate This Mac. That frees a slot on your licence. Then install Muse on the new Mac and paste in the same key to activate it. If the old Mac is gone or unavailable and you are stuck at the three-Mac limit, email support@theodorehq.com and we will free a slot for you.

Yes. Because there is a full 30-day free trial, you can be sure Muse suits you before you pay. On top of that, our terms give you a 14-day cooling-off right after purchase, and your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 always apply. If something is not right, email support@theodorehq.com and we will sort it out. Refund details are on the terms page at theodorehq.com/muse/terms.

Your licence key was sent to the email address you used at checkout, in the order confirmation, so a quick search of your inbox for Muse usually turns it up. If you cannot find it, email support@theodorehq.com from the address you bought with and we will resend it. There is no account to log into, so your purchase email is the record of your licence.

Three quick checks fix almost every case. First, make sure the Muse app is actually open, since the extension saves into the running app. Second, confirm the extension is installed for the browser you are using, from the links on theodorehq.com/muse. Third, if your trial has ended, activate a licence, because saving is paused while the app is locked. The extension popup shows whether it is connected to the app, which tells you at a glance where the gap is.

X syncing is off until you switch it on, so start by opening the extension popup and turning on the X bookmarks toggle, then approve the permission it requests. After that, the key step is to scroll through your own X bookmarks page while signed in: Muse reads the bookmarks as your browser loads them, so scrolling back through the page is what backfills your history. Nothing is sent to X, and only photos and resolvable videos come across.

These two features use an optional image model that Muse downloads once, about 300 MB, the first time you use them. If results are empty, it may still be downloading, or your images may still be indexing after a big import. Give it a few minutes on a good connection, then try again. Everyday search by word, tag, colour and image text does not need this pack and works straight away.

From version 1.0.18 the pack also steps out of memory when you have not searched by meaning for a few minutes, which is what keeps Muse light while it sits open. The next search of that kind brings it back, so it can take a moment longer than usual before results appear. Find Similar is not affected and stays instant either way.

The richer, cloud-powered options, a reference-grade image prompt, Claude-written tags, and understanding full-sentence searches, are optional and run on your own Anthropic API key. If they seem to do nothing, add your key in Settings. Without a key, Muse quietly uses its built-in, on-device intelligence instead, which covers tagging, image-text and colour search, and the instant local prompt, so the app is fully useful with no key at all.

Roughly two in five web pages do not publish a preview image, so Muse shows a tidy card with the site icon and a clean title instead. That is expected, not a fault. If no links are showing previews at all, check that link previews are switched on in Settings, and that you are online, since Muse fetches each preview once. After the first fetch, the image is stored locally and stays put.

Muse's shortcuts, like Cmd-Shift-K for the Launcher or Cmd-Shift-S for a screenshot, are global, so if another app or a system feature already uses the same combination, Muse's version can be blocked. Open Settings > Shortcuts and rebind the one that is not firing to a free combination. Everything in Muse is rebindable, so you can shape the shortcuts around whatever else you run.

When you use the grab hotkey or the clipper, Muse asks the browser for the address of the page you are on, so a saved image or clip carries a link back to where it came from. macOS shows a one-time Automation prompt for this the first time. Approving it is what lets your saves remember their source. Muse uses it only to read the current page's URL, nothing more.

The first time you open any freshly downloaded app, macOS checks it with Gatekeeper. Muse is a notarised Developer ID app, so it is trusted, but if macOS is cautious, right-click (or Control-click) the Muse app in your Applications folder and choose Open, then confirm. You only need to do this once. After that, Muse opens normally, and future updates arrive quietly through the app.

A freshly opened Muse sits at roughly 450 MB with a library loaded, most of which is the pictures you are looking at and the window drawing them. That figure rises while you work, which is normal: Muse keeps recently viewed images ready so scrolling back through a collection stays instant, and it hands those back when it no longer needs them.

Searching by meaning adds more for a while, because that uses an on-device model. From version 1.0.18 the model loads only when you first search and steps out again a few minutes after you stop, rather than sitting in memory for the whole time Muse is open. If you ever noticed Muse sitting high in Activity Monitor, updating to 1.0.18 or later resolves that.

One thing worth knowing when you check: macOS reports memory being handed back late, often a minute or two afterwards, so the number in Activity Monitor lags behind what Muse has actually released.

Almost always this is the summon key. Muse ships with the Drop Ring waiting for Control, so that dragging files around your Mac never calls up something you did not ask for. Start the drag first, then hold Control, and the ring opens around your cursor. Keep holding while you move onto the collection you want, and let go to drop.

If you would rather it appeared on its own, open Settings → Muse → Drop Ring and switch off Hold to Summon. The same panel lets you swap the key for Command, Option or Shift.

If you are already holding the key and the ring still stays away, one of these will be why:

• Show For is set to Browsers, and the drag started somewhere else. Set it to Every App.
• The app you are dragging from is listed under Never Show For. CleanShot X is on that list out of the box, so drags from its screenshot tray are left alone on purpose.
• The drag started inside Muse's own window. The ring only catches things arriving from other apps.
• The thing being dragged is not an image, file, link or piece of text.

The Drop Ring section in Settings shows its current mode next to the heading, either Browsers or Every app, so you can see how it is set without opening anything.

No. Your library is stored as real files on your own Mac, and Muse has no cloud sync and no server that holds your collection. The everyday intelligence, tagging, image-text search, colour search and meaning search, all runs on your machine. The only things that leave your Mac are a few narrow, expected requests, covered in the questions below, and none of them include what you actually save.

Muse has no account, no login and no profile of you. It does record a small number of anonymous, non-identifying usage events, like the app being opened or a trial starting, so we can see roughly how the app is doing. These carry no personal information, no stable identifier, and never anything about what you save. The next question explains exactly what is and is not recorded.

Muse records four coarse events: the app being opened, a trial starting, a trial ending, and a licence being activated. They go to a small server we host ourselves, not a third-party analytics company, and they carry no name, no email, no device fingerprint and nothing about your library. We use them only as simple counts to understand how many people are trying and buying Muse. What you save, search for, or organise is never part of this and never leaves your Mac.

By default, no. Tagging, reading text inside images, colour search and meaning search all run on your Mac, and your pictures are not sent anywhere. There is an optional cloud tier for a richer image description and better tags, but it only works if you add your own Anthropic API key, and it stays completely off until you do. With no key, every AI feature that Muse uses is on-device.

The extension reads the page you are actively clipping so it can send that image, link or page to Muse, and, if you switch it on, the bookmarks on your own X page. It does not read your browsing history or other tabs. It talks only to the Muse app on the same Mac over a local connection that never touches the wider internet, and the app downloads any media itself. Nothing goes to an outside server.

Your files are always yours. When a trial ends, the app locks so you cannot save or edit until you buy, but nothing is deleted, and buying reopens the exact library you built. Because your collection is real files in a visible folder on your Mac, you can open, copy and back it up in Finder at any time, with or without Muse running. Your originals never leave your machine and never expire.

Yes. Muse is built to be private: your library never leaves your Mac, there is no account, and the only data we collect is a handful of anonymous usage counts. The maker, THEODORE HQ, is a company registered in England and Wales, and the app is covered by a plain privacy policy and terms at theodorehq.com/muse that set out your rights under the UK GDPR and the Consumer Rights Act 2015.