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Context

Shelf remembers what belongs together.

Things you save separately are rarely unrelated. A screenshot, the page it came from, the note you wrote that evening: one thought, saved in three pieces.

Shelf links them by topic, session, source and idea, and shows the evidence behind every link.

Download ShelfSee how it works

You sent a screenshot to Shelf.

Saved thing

Settings screen, dark appearance

Screenshot · 14 August

Why this belongs here

“Appearance · Dark”. Read out of the image by OCR, on device.

An illustration of how one saved item becomes a memory. Not a live library.

01 · The problem

Everything arrives as a separate file.

You saved five things about one project across three weeks. Nothing in your Mac knows they were about the same thing.

02 · The old way

Tagging is a second job.

Manual tags and folders only hold while you keep maintaining them. They decay the week you get busy, which is the week you save the most.

03 · Shelf

Connections you didn't have to make.

Same topic
Two things about the same subject, judged locally from their content.
Same session
Saved close together, in one stretch of work.
Same source
Captured from the same website or app.
Similar content
Close meaning between text, OCR text or transcripts.
Related notes
A note that reuses the language of something else you kept.
Collections
When enough things belong together, Shelf groups them.

04 · Memory

One project, five separate saves.

  1. ScreenshotA pricing table you captured in March.
  2. WebsiteThe page it came from.
  3. PDFA research paper you read afterwards.
  4. NoteTwo paragraphs you wrote the same evening.
  5. Reference imageA layout you liked, saved without a name.

What Shelf sees

Five things, saved weeks apart, that clearly belong to the same piece of thinking.

05 · Retrieval

Find one thing, get the thread.

Opening a memory shows what it sits next to, so re-finding one item hands back the context around it.

Every connection states its reason, and you can undo the ones you disagree with.

06 · Privacy

Connections are made on your Mac.

The reasoning behind a link is local. Nothing is uploaded to work out that two things are related.

Stop saving things into isolation.

Keep what matters. Shelf keeps the relationships between it.

Download Shelf

Free. macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon and Intel. No account.

Keep reading

Shelf V3 is out now

Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.

This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.

Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.

Download the latest version →Version 3.0 · macOS 14+