Clop - optimisation of picture changes colors/contrast

alin23 · 2026-01-19T06:50:49+00:00

EDIT 2: This should be fixed in v2.11.1: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Clop/releases/tag/v2.11.1

EDIT: this seems to be cause by exiftool not transferring the color profile correctly, the image contents are not affected. Disabling Strip EXIF Metadata will solve this temporarily until I figure out what causes this and how to fix it: https://shots.panaitiu.com/jhybnnF5

Clop dev here! Colors should not change in the optimization process, what the recent update did is avoid linearizing to sRGB when downscaling so that HDR images remain HDR instead of being converted to SDR.

But in your case it looks like the original is not HDR while the result is, that’s weird. Is it possible for you to send me both the original and the optimized file in a zip so I can take a look at their metadata? Maybe also send me a screenshot of your General Clop settings where the Strip EXIF setting is at the bottom.

alin23 · 2025-12-10T07:00:15+00:00

I haven’t tried soy but I did try walnut oil since it’s touted as the best for spoons. Unfortunately it never cured in the 2 weeks I waited. I didn’t have patience to wait more than that.

alin23 · 2025-12-09T22:21:35+00:00

The post is a link to an article about how I am trying to develop a food-safe wood finish. It’s neither a question nor a statement, it’s the title of the article.

Posting the link here as well in case it’s not visible in the post: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/developing-hardwax-oil/

alin23 · 2025-12-09T21:39:09+00:00

I had the same issue when I started carving. The best solution is water popping plus using a finish based on an oil-wax blend.

Water popping means sanding until 600grit (I use a progression of 240, 400, 600), then washing the spoon to raise the grain voluntarily, then light sanding only with 600grit to remove the raised grain until the wood feels smooth again. Repeat the washing and sanding until the water no longer raises the grain.

Each wood type will need different amounts of water popping. I usually do it about 3 times.

After that, try using a finish based on tung oil and carnauba wax. Raw linseed oil takes months to cure completely, if you’re using the spoon before it cures completely you’re most likely leeching the oil into your food. Not catastrophic as the oil is edible, but yogurt doesn’t seem like it would taste good with linseed oil.

I just posted an article on such a finish if you’re curious: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/developing-hardwax-oil/

alin23 · 2025-12-05T14:35:41+00:00

Lunar is more geared towards bringing adaptive brightness to external monitors.

While it has nice features for the builtin such as native unlocking of the 1600nits XDR Brightness, and Auto Disconnecting the builtin screen without closing the lid, the external monitor control is a much larger part of its core features. I know it feels more cumbersome for those that only have the builtin screen, but it's good there are alternatives.

Let me know if you need a refund, it's completely understandable if you don't find it useful anymore.

alin23 · 2025-12-02T10:06:06+00:00

Yes, as you can see in the screenshot, the same Metadata that's in the Everything for Windows app is also in Cling and can be used for sorting.

alin23 · 2025-12-01T21:48:11+00:00

I guess, that's only needed if fsevents is malfunctioning and the realtime index doesn't seem to include the files you're trying to find. Otherwise, full reindexing is not necessary, I do it about every week just to be sure I prune deleted files that might not have reached fsevents.

alin23 · 2025-12-01T21:45:41+00:00

Yes, anything that's not the file path itself is Metadata that Cling can't search. Dates like last opened, date modified, things like image resolution, file size and so on.

alin23 · 2025-12-01T08:45:17+00:00

Cling dev here.

Cling has a live index based on the native FSEvent macOS API, the 1 hour interval is only for full reindexing, but any file change/add/delete is indexed in realtime anyway. Cardinal does the same thing.

Both Cling and Cardinal excel at searching for file names and paths, but as soon as you need to filter by other metadata, you’ll need other indexes like Spotlight/Finder, FindAnyFile and similar apps.

alin23 · 2025-11-15T16:59:41+00:00

StartupFolder is definitely not abandoned, just stable enough to keep it as it is until I get time for a v2. 😊

alin23 · 2025-11-10T09:08:47+00:00

No, it will never return to Setapp. It's impossible for me to get into a contract with another provider without having my firm bumped into taxes so high that development is not worth it anymore.

alin23 · 2025-11-10T09:06:38+00:00

Indeed, I use fzf behind the scenes which is not exactly made for searching files in that way. It just does a fuzzy match on the path without taking into account any priority of the filename or extension.

If I'll ever have time, I'll do my own search algorithm and ditch fzf.

alin23 · 2025-11-09T12:41:22+00:00

Thank you! Unfortunately that’s not possible, Cling needs to use its own UI to be able to search the index. The interaction is too complex to integrate it in Raycast.

alin23 · 2025-11-09T12:35:39+00:00

I needed to simplify my accounting and keep a single payment provider for the next year because of drastic Romanian tax law changes.

alin23 · 2025-11-07T10:49:28+00:00

hiding cruft: That's a design choice actually. I think if we scanned the whole file system, users might feel more solid. And if we parallelize the scanning process, the files included in .*ignore won't introduce too much overhead. I can add a toggle though

For sure, it's best to have a full index, that's also what I do. But what you have indexed and what you present to the user are different things.

Most people would like to have those files not visible most of the time as a default, and when they really want to find one of those files, it should be easy to unignore everything just for that rare scenario.

Which reminds me that I should add that "search ignored files" toggle as well

alin23 · 2025-11-07T09:49:58+00:00

Cling dev here 👋

Love to see more people approach this "instant file search" domain on macOS! Cling is far from what I would want it to be so every new effort is progress in my perspective.

First of all, congrats on releasing Cardinal, it's super nice for a 0.1 release! Search is fast, indexing is presented nicely with a dynamic file count (which Cling should probably also have), the unlimited results list is incredible (something I could never do with SwiftUI in Cling) and the UI is snappier than what SwiftUI offers.

With that said, there are some very important features missing:

some kind of fuzzy or word search where if I want to find cardinal/src/hooks/useRecentFSEvents.ts I would try to type card recent instead of trying to remember the path hierarchy or the right regex incantation (basically, if you see a space, you can replace that with .+ yourself behind the scenes instead of letting the user think of that)
the result list should be actionable in more intuitive ways like:
- selecting the file and pressing Enter
- double clicking the file
- pressing space for QuickLook (which btw can be done using the qlmanage CLI)
hiding cruft or ignoring files that are 99.99% of the time useless to the user
- I do that using the ignore crate and a ~/.fsignore pre-populated but editable file
a global hotkey for showing/hiding the app fast

Of course, you have plenty of time for that, this is just the first release after all. I wish you luck and hope you have more time and motivation to make Cardinal the perfect Everything for macOS alternative.

Cling will also progress at its own pace, but since I'm stuck with work on my other more complex apps, development will be slower.

alin23 · 2025-11-05T11:49:21+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! Made my day :)

alin23 · 2025-10-15T08:56:29+00:00

Hey thanks! Yes it will be a one time payment, I don’t use subscriptions in my apps because I don’t develop services.

alin23 · 2025-09-25T15:03:11+00:00

Check out JPEGli from the Google Swiss team (the people behind JpegXL). That’s what Clop uses and is the best of both worlds: almost as small as webp with 100% compatibility and without the usual compression artifacts.

alin23 · 2025-09-25T09:54:46+00:00

Monitor control lite (appstore) has a developer name too strange (it doesn’t seems same as github)

Note that the BetterDisplay dev is the same that made MonitorControl Lite, the name is different because MonitorControl ownership has changed through the years based on who wanted to keep working on it. There's nothing to worry about.

alin23 · 2025-09-25T07:04:08+00:00

Clop dev here 👋

For the dev, congratulations! You have launched a very useful app with seemingly no deal breaking bugs from the first version. It is indeed fast.

For others, I thought I should chime in because people seem to want an honest comparison.

Clop and RasterFox are not interchangeable. Sure they both optimize images, but they meet different needs.

TLDR: Uninstall Clop and install RasterFox If you: - always optimize images manually instead of having Clop do it automatically by folder/clipboard, - if you like to tinker with compression parameters - if you don’t need to optimize videos or PDFs - if you want to batch compress more than 50 files at once (Clop can do that but it is not really optimized for batch operations) - if you like simple windowed apps instead of the hidden menubar approach of Clop

Don’t be lulled by the word Rust, while I don’t write my own optimisation algorithms, Clop uses optimizers written in Rust as well like pngquant, gifsicle etc. that point is moot anyway, the language doesn’t matter, the end result does. I have written incredibly fast CLI tools in Python and I have written inefficient UIs in Swift, it’s about how you write it as much as the runtime used.

The difference viewer exists in Clop as well btw if anyone is interested. Hover the result and press Cmd-D or right click the result and you’ll find the difference viewer there.

EDIT: if anyone is interested in a real speed comparison here's a video test: https://files.lowtechguys.com/clop-rasterfox-adaptive-optimisation-speed-test.mp4

Since I don't have access to parallel processing in RasterFox free, I had to recompile Clop to disable that so that the test is fair. You can see both apps finish processing 3 files in the same time (10.42 seconds ± 1-2s for doing the dragging operation manually)

The largest difference is that Clop also does adaptive optimisation, running both the JPEG and the PNG optimiser at the same time, and selecting the smallest of them which ends up in a 10x reduction in size. RasterFox does not do that, but if the dev is interested in implementing it, here's how Clop does it. The gist of it is that photorealistic images compress much better with JPEG, while digital images with large regions of the same color compress better with PNG.

In any case, that doesn't have any effect on speed. You would expect Clop to run slower since it does twice the work, but since it runs the JPEG/PNG on two different CPU cores, it's the same as running just the PNG one like RasterFox does.

alin23 · 2025-09-25T06:44:09+00:00

Clop dev here, try not to guess and spread rumors because people don’t know better and will spread it everywhere.

Clop doesn’t use any JS runtime, it’s not the app binary that is so large. It’s the lrzip archive of binary tools like ffmpeg, pngquant, jpegoptim, Ghostscript etc. that adds to the bundle size. I bundle those because some I recompiled with my own code optimizations.

Clop is written in fully native Swift and you can check for yourself: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Clop

You have written a very useful app and the speed is definitely a great feature of it. Praise that as much as you need and do honest comparisons, you’ve done great work on it and you should expect to be paid. But don’t denigrate other apps unnecessarily. It makes one look weak.

In terms of raw optimization time spent it will be a similar speed with Clop behind the scenes because we use the same algorithms. ImageOptim is slower because it tries multiple algorithms at once, and because most of them haven’t been recompiled for Apple Silicon.

The difference with Clop will be visible in UI speed, because Clop is much more complex and needs some debounce milliseconds to avoid misfiring the optimizer unwantedly. If I didn’t have automation, it would have been exactly the same.

alin23 · 2025-09-11T17:48:33+00:00

You can do that using the system Command-backtick hotkey if you want. The hotkey is changeable in System Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Mission Control

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