Journal

A few days ago, Mount launched with a focus on doing one thing perfectly: framing a single image with respect and precision. But a photographer's workflow rarely stops at one photo.

Version 1.1 is about expanding the digital studio. I wanted to give you the tools to tell broader stories and exert finer control over your final export, all without sacrificing the minimalist, high-performance ethos that started this project.

The biggest architectural shift in this update is the ratio selection system. It has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to provide exact precision for both Landscape and Portrait orientations, now organized in a balanced, symmetrical 4-column grid. I’ve also introduced a highly requested feature: the ability to preserve your original uncropped photo ratio while still building out the canvas frame around it.

Here is everything new in version 1.1:

Major Additions

• Batch Editing: Select and process multiple photos at once to keep your gallery exports cohesive.
• Double (Diptych) Mode: Tell a two-part story with side-by-side or stacked layouts, featuring individual controls for each photo.
• Pro Color Suite: High-fidelity, hardware-accelerated adjustments for Brightness, Shadows, Highlights, Saturation, Temperature, and Tint.
• Photo Framing: Fine-tune the presentation with adjustable inner border thickness and a neutral color palette.
• Typography: The metadata overlay now supports Sans, Serif, and Mono typefaces to better match your aesthetic.

Comprehensive Ratio Updates

• Landscape Canvas: 1:1, 5:4, 4:3, 7:5, 3:2, 16:9, and 1.91:1.
• Portrait Canvas: 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 5:7, 2:3, 9:16, and 1:1.91.
• Original Framing: A dedicated "Orig" option preserves the exact aspect ratio of your imported photo within the canvas framing.

Experience & Engine Optimizations

• Refined UI: A rebuilt gallery featuring high-res thumbnails and smooth multi-selection checkmarks, alongside a polished drawer with left-aligned labels.
• Stay-on-Save: Export multiple different versions of the same edit without leaving the screen.
• Advanced Export Pipeline: The engine now automatically corrects metadata text color based on your canvas darkness and ensures per-photo effects are baked in at full resolution.
• Bug Squashing: Fixed corner rounding in Double mode, resolved filter intensity loss during final rendering, and optimized background memory when switching layout modes.

Mount is, and will remain, a free tool for the photography community.

Developing in a vacuum is one thing; putting it into the world is another.

Within 24 hours of finishing the 1.0 build, I spent time as my own harshest critic. I caught a few "day one" bugs that weren't up to my standard - specifically some metadata layout overflows on narrow canvases and some opportunities to shave a few milliseconds off the shadow rendering engine.

Version 1.0.1 is a quick "polish" update to ensure that when you first open Mount, it’s as stable and fast as possible.

The Personal Launch

Because Mount is a one-man project with a $0 marketing budget, you won't see me running big, flashy ads. Instead, I’m doing things the "old-fashioned" way.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be spending my time on Instagram, connecting directly with photographers whose work I genuinely admire. If you see me in your comments or DMs, it’s just me reaching out to see if my tool can help tell your story a little better. I believe the best way to grow this app is one conversation at a time.

What’s New in 1.0.1:

• Metadata Precision: Fixed a rendering bug where long lens specs would overlap on specific frame ratios.
• Shadow Optimisation: Rewrote the blur algorithm to handle 48MP exports even faster.
• iOS 17+ Audit: Final compatibility check for the latest iPhone 16 Pro hardware.

Mount is, and will remain, a free tool for the photography community. If you like the vision, a share or a shoutout goes a long way.

Mount started as a personal frustration. As a photographer, I found that the digital tools available for sharing work often felt like an afterthought. They were either cluttered with ads, hidden behind aggressive subscriptions, or simply didn't treat the image with the respect it deserved.

I believe that the tools we use to present our art should be as intentional as the art itself. I also believe they should be accessible. Professional-grade framing and metadata tools shouldn't be stuck behind a paywall.

Mount 1.0 is my attempt to build the "perfect" digital studio - a one-man project built on the idea that minimalist design and high-performance engineering can coexist.

The Craft

For the launch, I focused on three pillars: Depth, Metadata, and Performance.

• The Polaroid Engine: I built a custom layout system to replicate the iconic "chin" of physical instant film, ensuring the ratios feel natural rather than digitally stretched.
• Elevation Shadows: To give your photos a physical presence on a digital screen, I developed a dual-shadow system - sophisticated outer drops combined with "inset" inner shadows to create a layered, gallery-effect.
• The Metadata Overlay: I wanted to celebrate the gear we use. Mount extracts your camera’s DNA - aperture, ISO, lens specs - and renders it in a custom dot-matrix style that acts like a gallery plaque.
• Pro-Grade Power: With the 48MP sensors in the latest iPhones, I knew the app had to be fast. I utilised Isolate-Based Processing, meaning all the heavy lifting happens in the background, keeping the interface buttery smooth even when handling massive ProRAW files.

This is a labor of love. There are no accounts to create and no data being harvested. It’s just a tool for photographers, by a photographer. If you find it useful, there is a tip jar inside to help me keep the lights on, but the features will always remain free for everyone to use.