Support
Email reaches the person who wrote the code. There is no ticket queue and no chatbot in the way.
Getting started
NOT YET Negativo is still being built, so there is nothing to download at the moment. The rest of this section describes how it will work.
Once there is a build, you download the trial, open the disk image and drag Negativo into your Applications folder. The first time you open it, macOS will ask you to confirm you want to run an app downloaded from the internet — that is Gatekeeper doing its job.
On first launch you get an empty catalog and one button: Choose folder…. Point it at a folder of photographs, or drag one onto the window. Negativo indexes what it finds in place. It does not move, copy or rename anything, and it does not ask you to import.
Indexing a large folder takes a while the first time. You can browse what has already been read while the rest catches up.
Requirements: macOS macOS 15 or later, Apple silicon or Intel, and read and write access to the folders you want catalogued — write access because the sidecars go next to your photos.
How it works
DRAFT
This section will explain what Negativo does with your files, where the metadata is written, and where the catalog itself lives on disk. It is deliberately unwritten until the app is finished, because the honest answer depends on decisions still being made.
What is already true and will not change: your originals are never modified, metadata goes into standard .xmp sidecars next to each photo, and the catalog is an index that can be thrown away and rebuilt from those sidecars.
Keyboard shortcuts
The loupe is built to be driven without touching the mouse. These are the keys that matter during a first pass.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ← → | Previous and next photo. |
| ↑ ↓ | Jump to the previous or next folder in view. |
| 0 – 5 | Set the star rating. 0 clears it. |
| P | Flag as a pick. |
| X | Flag as a reject. |
| I | Show or hide the metadata panel. |
| H | Hide the interface and show the photo on its own. |
| Esc | Leave the loupe and go back to the grid. |
Trial and licensing
The trial is the full application for 30 days. Nothing is held back, no feature is greyed out, and it does not require an account or an email address to start.
When the trial ends, your catalog and all your work stay exactly where they are. Buy a licence and everything is there waiting; the sidecars were on your disk the whole time regardless.
A licence is a one-time purchase of $69 USD. Use it on as many Macs as you personally use — there is no device limit. Updates are free for a year from purchase, and the app keeps working normally after that. Full terms are on the legal page.
DRAFT Buying sends you a licence key by email. The exact activation step is written up once the licensing UI is final — what is settled is that it happens on your Mac, with no server contacted to validate the key and no online activation to fail years from now.
Lost your key? Email support@negativo.appfrom the address you bought with and we will resend it.
Troubleshooting
DRAFT
This section will cover what to do when a folder shows as unavailable, what happens when you disconnect a drive mid-session, and how to force a rebuild of the catalog. The exact steps depend on behaviour that is still being built, so writing them now would mean writing them wrong.
The shape of the answers is already settled. A disconnected drive does not lose you anything: the folder stays in the catalog and is marked offline, thumbnails and metadata remain browsable and searchable, and reconnecting the drive restores access to the full-size files. Deleting the catalog is recoverable, because Negativo reads the sidecars back off disk to rebuild it — collections and stacks are the exception, since those describe relationships between files rather than properties of one.
Contact
Email support@negativo.app. Expect a reply within one working day, from a person, in Spain.
If you are reporting a bug, the three things that help most are your macOS version, the Negativo version from Negativo → About, and what you were doing right before it happened. A screenshot beats a description.
There is no support chat, no ticket portal and no newsletter. Email is the whole system.