On Shipping Shuttlecar
I was starting to use Claude Code and I wanted an image viewer for thirty years of photos in mixed formats — RAW, JPEG, the occasional weird thing. I didn’t want to resubscribe to Adobe. Partly the monthly money. Partly that Lightroom is too heavyweight for what I needed. That, and the cloud aspect creeps me out.
I looked around. I didn’t see what I wanted. So I made it.
The technical bet was that with a competent pair programmer who could analyze frameworks, build my toolchain, and debug at lightning speed — and who could also write Swift — building it wouldn’t take a long time. Was Claude as efficient as a senior human engineer? Probably not. Was it more efficient than me alone? Definitely. The result is a small native Mac app called Shuttlecar that opens 70+ image formats fast, lets you read EXIF, write your own copyright and authorship fields back in, and strip the surveillance data — GPS, serial numbers, timestamps — before you share. It’s the first thing I’ve shipped under my own name since Shapemix.
A few things I learned making it.
Platforms and all-in-one tools are great until they aren’t, and that includes price. The photographers I know have personal workflows, and the analytical part of those workflows — finding, sorting, tagging, filtering — is just as important as the image-editing part, but it gets crowded out by features built for everyone. Shuttlecar is opinionated about that crowding. It does the analytical layer well and stops there.
Tags belong outside your files, not inside them. I added a lightweight tagging system that writes to a plain JSON file next to your photos. I didn’t want to embed sorting decisions into image files I might publish later, and I didn’t want my taxonomy locked inside the app. Move the folder, the tags travel. If Shuttlecar disappears tomorrow, your work is exactly where you left it.
The hard part wasn’t the code. It was the discipline of saying no — to features I didn’t need. Or to a subscription model or a cloud sync layer that would have been three weeks of work and a permanent maintenance burden. I didn’t want either of those features and neither should you. The cloud is just someone else’s computer, and subscription models extract value from customers whilst providing none in return.
If you take pictures and you want a fast, local, opinionated image viewer that respects your files and your privacy, it’s there. If you’re a developer or designer thinking about what current AI tooling actually makes possible for one person working alone, Shuttlecar is one data point. I’m happy to talk about either.
—Colin