Installing Vixlo

Vixlo runs on your Mac, and it is licensed by a Vixlo account you create on the website. This page takes you from nothing installed to the app open and waiting for a sign-in. You need it once; after that, Vixlo opens straight onto your libraries.

Before you start

• A Mac with Apple silicon, running macOS 14 or later. Vixlo 0.1 is a native macOS app built for the M-series chips (M1 and later). It does not run on an Intel Mac, an iPhone, an iPad or Windows. Apple menu ▸ About This Mac shows Chip on an Apple silicon Mac and Processor on an Intel one.
• An email address you can read. The account is confirmed by email before anything starts.
• A card or a folder of photographs, for your first library. You can install without one and import later.

Creating your account

The account is made on the website, not in the app.

1. Open the website's sign-up page, headed Create your account, from the link you were given with Vixlo 0.1. It is a tester release, and vixlo.app's own sign-up page is not open to everyone. An invite link opens the same page, and it says You have been invited with the access the code gives. If Vixlo is already on your Mac, Create an account on its sign-in card opens the sign-up page of the website that copy signs in to.
2. Fill in Your name, Email (the address you will sign in with on your Mac) and Password, ten characters or more. Tick I agree to the Terms and the Privacy Policy; without the tick the page stops you with Tick the box to continue — we record the moment you accept. If a verification check appears under the box, complete it. Then press Create account.
3. Vixlo emails you a link. Open it. It leads to a page headed Confirm your email, and one press of its button confirms the address, starts your seven days (or your complimentary access, with an invite) and signs you in on the website. Opening the link on its own changes nothing, so a mail scanner that checks links cannot use yours up. The link works once, within the hour. If it has expired, the page says That link has expired: press Sign in to send a new link, sign in, and follow Send it again.
4. The website asks three short questions, one page each: What do you shoot?, Which keys do your hands know? and Where should your takes start? The answers are saved to your account, and the app shows them under Your answers in Settings (The Account section).
5. The last page is headed Your seven days have started. (with an invite, Your complimentary access has started.) and has two buttons: Download Vixlo for Mac and Go to my account.

The sign-up page says it plainly: Seven days free. Your trial starts when you confirm your email, and there is no card to enter until it ends. An invite takes the trial's place; Complimentary access with an invite code says what it gives. The seven-day trial covers what happens when a trial ends.

In Vixlo 0.1

The app shows your three answers but does not use them: whatever you answered, Vixlo starts with its own defaults, although the download page says these three answers will already be there. To use the Lightroom or Photo Mechanic keys, choose them under Vixlo ▸ Keyboard… (The three presets).

Installing the app

The download is a zip of the app, signed for testing, and the download page says so.

1. Unzip it. You get Vixlo, the app itself.
2. Drag Vixlo to your Applications folder.
3. Open it.

In Vixlo 0.1

Vixlo 0.1 is signed for testing rather than notarised, Apple's check for apps that come from outside the App Store, so the Mac may stop it the first time you open it and say it cannot check the app for malicious software. Close that message, open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, and press Open Anyway beside Vixlo. If macOS will not open Vixlo has every step, the older ⌃-click route, and what to do when the button is missing.

There is no installer and no setup step. Vixlo culls a card and develops the takes with nothing else on the Mac. Two kinds of extra are optional:

• darktable, for a Max quality export. Max quality and darktable covers it.
• Models that sharpen search, People and Spot clean. Vixlo ships none. Vixlo ▸ Models… lists the ones on this Mac; with none installed it says that search, People and Spot clean all still work, less well. Vixlo 0.1 cannot add one from the app: see Face models.

The first launch

Vixlo opens one window, dark, with the launch screen behind a card headed Sign in to Vixlo. Vixlo asks nothing else at launch: no Keychain question, nothing to configure. With a card or a USB drive in the Mac, macOS asks a question of its own, whether Vixlo may access files on a removable volume. The launch screen looks on every such disk for a camera's DCIM folder, the import reads the photographs from it, and it lists the other files on the card by name so it can tell you what it did not copy. Say yes. Vixlo only reads a card and never writes to it. If you say no, macOS keeps Vixlo out of that disk and Vixlo cannot read the card; you can change the answer under System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Files & Folders, and A card Vixlo does not see covers a card that is not offered. macOS may ask again after you replace Vixlo with a newer download.

The one question Vixlo itself asks comes later, and only on a Mac that ran the earlier build of Vixlo, the one this version replaces. The first time you open a library there, Vixlo asks once whether to bring in the decisions from that build's culling sessions, or to leave them exactly where they are. Either way it never moves or deletes them. Decisions from the earlier build says what it matches and what each answer does.

Sign in with the email and password you just made. Signing in says what the card sends and what each refusal means.

Once you are in, the launch screen lists the libraries this Mac knows. On a new install those are three rows named Earlier library, which every Mac lists. They cannot be opened until you have made a library of your own; The launch screen says what they are. Your own first library is made from the right-hand column: Creating a library.

One account signs in on up to three Macs at once. Install Vixlo on a second Mac the same way and sign in with the same email and password; that Mac may stop Vixlo on its first open too, and the same steps get past it.

tip

The download page is always reachable from Download in the website's navigation bar, so you need not keep the zip.

Related

• If macOS will not open Vixlo
• Signing in
• The launch screen
• Confirmation emails and passwords