magpie

magpie is a visual library app that brings everything you save into one place. Its own summary is direct: everything you've saved, in one visual library. Rather than leaving references scattered across apps, magpie gathers your saves from Instagram, X, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Cosmos, Are.na, GitHub and your browser's bookmarks, and presents them as a single browsable collection of images, video saves and links. Each save is tagged by AI, so the library can be searched by what is actually in it, or by colour, rather than by the caption someone wrote or the account that posted it. The stated purpose is simple: give people who collect visual references a permanent, searchable home for them. It is built for anyone who saves things they intend to use later — designers, art directors, studios and other creatives working with visual references — rather than for people who save casually and never come back. The problem magpie addresses is familiar to anyone who collects references: your saves live in many different places. A poster might be saved on Instagram, a type treatment on Cosmos, a photograph on Are.na, a video on TikTok, and a repository on GitHub, with the rest arriving through browser bookmarks. Each of those platforms has its own way of organising and finding things, and none of them knows about the others. The content also has a habit of disappearing — posts get deleted, accounts go away, and the thing you saved is no longer there when you need it. magpie's answer is to keep everything you have saved, even when the post is gone, and to make the whole collection findable from one place instead of five. Capture is built around the places you already save from. The product lists Instagram, X, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Cosmos, Are.na, GitHub and your browser's bookmarks as sources, and its browser support covers Chrome, Safari and Firefox. The site also describes being able to paste a link anywhere, so a reference can be added without first navigating back to the app. Everything you save lands in the same library. In the sample library shown on the site, that library holds 265 saves — a mixed set of brand identities, packaging, editorial photography, motion work, film stills and travel imagery, each shown with the domain it came from, such as instagram.com or cosmos.so. The AI layer is what makes that mixed collection searchable. Because saves are tagged by AI based on what is in them, you can search by meaning instead of by the words attached to a post — the site's example is a search for somewhere by the sea, which surfaces images of coastlines, beaches and water without relying on captions. The same tagging supports searching by colour, so you can pull together the saves that are mostly one particular blue. Combined with the promise that saves are kept even when the post is gone, the tagging is what turns a pile of bookmarks into a reference library you can actually query later. Search is presented as a single bar that doubles as an input for requests. It reads find, or ask, and is available from a keyboard shortcut (⌘K) as well as on screen. The asking side goes beyond retrieval: in the sample shown on the site, the request references for a calm hardware launch returns saves that magpie has picked, each with a reason attached, and then makes a project of them. So the same bar can either find a specific thing you remember saving or assemble a reasoned starting point for something you are about to work on. Browsing the library is flexible. The interface supports rows and cells as layout options, with grid and canvas views alongside them, plus simple zoom controls for moving between an overview of many saves and a closer look at a few. Saves can be grouped into collections — the site shows an Instagram collection of posters and prints — and video saves open and play directly inside magpie rather than sending you back to the source. Between the search bar, the AI projects and the collection views, the library can be read at several levels: everything at once, a themed subset, or a set assembled for a particular brief. The outcome magpie is built around is continuity. Because your saves are kept even when the post is gone, a reference you found two years ago is still there when a project needs it, which is not true of a bookmark pointing at a deleted account. Because everything lands in one library instead of several, you search once rather than repeating the same search across Instagram, Pinterest, Are.na and your bookmarks. And because the AI tags by content and colour, you can search for what a save looks like rather than for what you remembered typing when you saved it. Concrete uses appear throughout the product's own material. One example is finding a reference by mood: a search for somewhere by the sea, or browsing the saves that are mostly one of a particular blue. Another is assembling references for a brief by asking for them — references for a calm hardware launch — and receiving a set of saves with a stated reason for each, organised as a project. Another is reviewing a themed collection, such as posters and prints saved from Instagram, or opening a video save and letting it play in place. Another is adding to the library while browsing, either by saving from a supported platform or by pasting a link wherever you happen to be. magpie is presented as an app you download for Mac, with a free way to start, and it works alongside the browsers its users already save from — Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Its natural audience is people whose work depends on visual reference: designers collecting identities, packaging and typography; art directors gathering campaign and editorial imagery; studios building mood and direction; and anyone who treats saves as raw material for future projects rather than as a private archive to scroll once. Taken together, magpie's value proposition is that the things you save should be treated as a library, not as a feed. One visual library collects them, AI tagging makes them searchable by meaning and colour, and the saves are kept even when the original post is gone — so the references you gathered stay usable long after you saved them.