Shelf for creators
Keep the things that become your next idea.
Creative work is built from things you notice. An image. A frame. A sound reference. A strange website. A campaign. A sentence. A moment.
Shelf gives those sparks somewhere to wait for you.
Warm, overexposed
- Sun-blown portrait
- Amber title card
- Desert road clip
- Cream and rust palette
Hand-made type
- Painted shop sign
- Marker-drawn logo
- Zine spread
One-idea websites
- A site that's just a countdown
- Scroll-driven photo essay
- A single black page
The problem
Inspiration is easy to find. Hard to find again.
Saving is one tap. The cost arrives later, when a folder of two thousand images is exactly as useful as a folder of none.
Feeds are built to give you the next thing. Shelf is built to give you back the thing you already chose.
- Saved reels you'll never scroll back to
- A camera roll of screenshots of screenshots
- Boards you stopped naming
- Links sent to yourself in a chat
Describe the look. Get the reference.
Shelf searches on what it can genuinely read: what's visible in an image, the text inside it, colour, the meaning of the thing, and when you kept it.
What you remember
Monochrome. Huge type over a face. Almost no product.
Clues Shelf can use
- Visual characteristics: monochrome, high contrast, large type over an image
- Text read in the image: three words, all caps
- Meaning: an advertising campaign, not a portrait
- Visual similarity
- No colour, strong contrast, type dominating the frame.
- Text inside the image
- The three-word line is readable.
- Related memory
- Kept with five other campaign references.
Kept nearby
- Zine spread · Same visual family
- A single black page · Saved the same day
Groups you didn't have to make.
Shelf groups things by what they're about and what they look like. You can rename a group, or ignore it entirely and just search.
Warm, overexposed
By look- Portraits
- Title cards
- Road clip
- Palette
Hand-made type
By subject- Painted signs
- Marker logos
- Zine spreads
One-idea websites
By kind- Countdown
- Photo essay
- Black page
Saved at 1am
By time- Nine images
- Two clips
- One long thread
Your unreleased work stays yours.
Reference libraries give away what you're about to make: the campaign not yet shot, the brand not yet announced, the direction a client hasn't approved.
Shelf keeps and reads that library on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded to be understood, and nothing trains a model. Optional external-model features are marked and off by default.
What you notice becomes what you make.
Give your inspiration a memory.
Keep the sparks somewhere they can be found on the day you need one.
Keep exploring
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.