Muse: a private local asset manager built for the way designers collect and use inspiration
Too many references, too few ways to meaningfully access them
Every designer out there keeps a folder of saved images — screenshots, stills, packaging shots, type specimens, flashy UIs. Mine had grown to thousands of files with names like “Screenshot 2025-11-04 at 2.14.51 PM.” Searchable in theory but challenging in practice when you need to gather it together during the early phases of a project.
Cloud tools solve part of this, but they want your library on their servers, behind an account, and eventually behind a subscription. So I set out to build a tool for myself and other creatives to effectively utilize their vast collection of inspiration accrued over years of their professional lives (empowered by AI of course) to:
Rapidly build moodboards on-demand from single sentences.
Need a board made up of 90s-style advertising posters? Or eCommerce UI on mobile? Just write it out and Muse will find the best matches from your collection.
Oh and Muse is completely localized to your own machine. No cloud. No subscription. Completely free and open source forever.
Drag any type of image in from Finder, the browser, or another app — Muse copies the original, auto-tags, generates alt-text, and extracts a colour palette on import.
Core features that make Muse a daily driver for creatives
Import from anywhere
Drag in images and video from Finder or a browser and Muse indexes it immediately for an incredibly snappy, offline experience.
Organized automagically
Semantic tags, alt-text, and colour profiles are generated by the local vision model, then indexed automatically for every new image in the background.
Search in plain language
Describe what you’re looking for in ordinary words and Muse finds it, with the AI running on your computer instead of someone else’s server.
Quickly see similar images
Focus an image or video and Muse will also show others like it based on subject, composition, and colour with a dial for how close a match you want.
Build a board from a sentence
Describe the board you want and Muse builds it from the most relevant images, skipping near-duplicates and ignoring anything that doesn’t belong.
Take your library with you
Save the whole library as one file to back up or move to another computer, and decide which images to keep when you import them back into Muse.
Quickly browse, edit, copy, find similar, and search. The more media you have, the better Muse gets.
Creating something completely local was the plan all along
Software used to be something you bought once and kept. It came on a disc, it installed on your machine, and it kept working whether or not the company that made it did. Somewhere along the way that stopped being normal.
Muse is a return to those days (sans disc). Everything lives in a folder on your Mac: images, database, even the AI models — so it opens instantly, works on a plane, and will never be gated behind a paywall.
Everything is yours, and only yours, unless you decide to share with others.
Technical stack powering Muse
Electron 41 + React 19
Desktop shell & frontend
TypeScript + Tailwind 4
Types & styling
SQLite + Zustand 5
Local database & state
sharp + node-vibrant
Thumbnails & palettes
Ollama + Qwen3-VL
On-device AI vision model
sqlite-vec + nomic-embed-text
Local vector search