We work on this every week.

October 2026

• Ask someone for files

  A share link has always run one way: you send, they open. Now it runs the other way as well. In any folder, the plus holds Ask someone for files. Say in a line what you are after, choose whether anyone with the link may send or only the people you name, set a size each file may run to or leave it open, and send the link. Whoever opens it meets a page under your logo with one job on it: drop the files here. No account, no sign-in, folders dropped whole with their structure kept, and nothing on the page but the sending. Each file lands in the folder you asked from the moment it finishes, named so it never writes over one already there, and you hear the moment the first one arrives, in the bell and on your phone, with the card counting up as the rest follow. A request can close on a date, or when you say so, and the folder it filled is simply yours, read and searchable like everything else here. It exists because a client was about to send us a whole shoot through a Drive folder of their own.

• Shipping, counted

  A receipt that charges for delivery used to come back with figures that would not add up, because the carriage sat outside the tax the shop had printed. The card now knows shipping as a figure of its own, says whether it was taxed, and books it to your accounts as the line it is.

September 2026

• Receipts, into the books

  What if your cloud storage could also connect to your accounts package, file and funnel your receipts straight in as entries, and even let you forward them from your mail app to a unique email address for the same? With Stowary, now you can. Just tell a folder it can hold receipts. It gets an address of its own, and a receipt forwarded there lands in the folder, is read the way any document here is read, and comes back as a card: who was paid, what for, and the figures as printed, with the tax checked against the total so a card is only trusted when its own arithmetic tallies. Connect your Xero organisation once, in Settings, and the card carries one button. A receipt goes in as spend from your bank account, dated the day it was paid, so the bank feed matches it; an invoice as a bill awaiting payment; a credit as a credit note; each with the document attached. The account it is coded to is a suggestion you confirm, taken from how that supplier was coded last time or, for a new one, from the receipt itself, written as a sentence you can read while the code stays under the hood. Nothing is sent unless a person sends it, and a receipt in another currency is booked as your bank charged it, with the original amount kept in the words. Every row in the folder says where its receipt stands. Xero is the first accounts package through this door.

• Spaces is now Stowary

  When the app reached the App Store it joined a long shelf of things called Spaces, and a name you have to scroll past to find is a name that is working against you. So we chose one of our own. To stow is to put something away with care, somewhere you will find it again, and a stowary is the place you keep it: one place for your work. Vidual stays the house it comes from, so it is Stowary, by Vidual, at stowary.com. Nothing you already have needed to change. Every old address, share link and sign-in link still opens exactly what it opened before, and your workspace simply answers at its new name as well. It came with a new mark, drawn by hand: a calm swell resting on a shelf. The Mac app already wears it, in your menu bar and your Finder sidebar, and the iPhone app follows in its next update.

• Frames: the post, made where the pictures already are

  Frames designs the posts and carousels you make from a shoot, inside Stowary, so the photographs never have to leave for another app and come back as copies. Choose a handful in any folder and start a design from them: they arrive already framed, and crop mode walks you through them one at a time so each lands where you want it. More pictures can join a design that already exists, and everything you have made sits on a shelf of its own, a row you can swipe on your phone. Your house set, the logo and the pieces that belong on every post, stays in its place from one design to the next, and when something drifts from it Frames asks whether that was on purpose, with a button to make the new spot the house spot. What you export is what you framed, and the words grow to meet the border before they wrap.

• Frames learned to move

  A slide can be footage now. Trim shortens a clip with the chunky handles every thumb already knows, crop frames it, and each layer can arrive in its own time, with closing marks that count back from the end and keep their timing through every trim. A carousel can blend the two, photographs on some slides and footage on another, and the export renders the whole piece as one film, made on our own servers in a single pass.

• One bar, at every size

  The desktop had grown four separate places that each said what the phone says with one bar: a strip asking you to drop files, a cluster of buttons beside the folder's name, a download-everything button, and a bar that appeared once you had chosen something. All four have gone. The action bar you use on your phone now sits at the foot of the desktop too, holding the same things in the same places, and the whole page takes a drop from the Finder without being asked. A folder also chooses its own view now, opening as a grid when it is mostly pictures and as a list when it is mostly documents, with one small line at the top if you would like it the other way.

• We took the wall down

  In August we let you pin a folder to a wall and arrange its pictures by hand, the hero large and the alternates around it. We lived with it for a month and took it down again. It asked for a layout before a shoot could be shared, and the people opening the link mostly wanted to look through the pictures one after another, which the grid already does well. Pinning now does one plain thing: it keeps a folder at the top of its list, marked, so the shoot you are in the middle of is always the first thing you see. Much of this month went the same way. The work has mostly been taking material away, a surface at a time, to find the shape that was underneath.

• Pictures that pass like pages

  Stepping through a shoot used to empty the screen between frames, with the next picture arriving from nothing. Now it waits just off the edge, so as one photograph leaves the next is already sliding in, at the speed your finger moved, the way the Photos app does it. It behaves the same with Reduce Motion switched on, because a picture finishing the swipe you started is your movement carried through.

• A picture at rest is just a picture

  The markup tools used to float over every photograph whether you wanted them or not. They live in the plus now, as Mark up beside Comment, and unfold only when you reach for them. Press F and everything else steps aside, leaving the picture on its own, edge to edge.

• Search knows when a photo was taken

  Ask for shots from January 2025, or jan 2025, or last summer, and Stowary answers from the date the camera recorded, with each card now showing the day a picture was taken where it used to show the day it arrived. Plenty of exports lose the camera's clock along the way, so where a photograph has no date of its own we read the one it is filed under — 2017, then 4_April, then 22nd — and say so on the card, as 22 Apr 2017 · from folder. A folder only ever answers as precisely as it is named, so one called 2025 turns up for 2025 and never for January. The camera details on a picture now name the place it was taken as well, worked out on our own servers.

• A nudge before a transfer disappears

  Files sent with Vidual Send are kept for four days, which is plenty until the day someone misses the email. If a transfer hasn't been downloaded by its last day, the people it was sent to now get one short reminder that the files are about to go, with the link, while there is still time to fetch them.

August 2026

• The keys your hands already know

  Hold Cmd and click to add another frame to a pile, or hold Shift and click further down the list to take everything in between — the two gestures every photographer has in their fingers from Lightroom and the Finder, working here the way they work there. A chosen file now lights up whole, so what you have gathered reads by running your eye down the page, and the picking is no longer the loudest thing on it. Once you have the set you want, you can share it, move it, delete it, or take the four out of nineteen you chose as a single zip, which was the one thing missing. Escape lets the whole lot go.

• The same file page, whatever you opened it on

  Open a photograph on your desk and you now get the action bar you have been using on your phone all week, in the same three positions, holding the same things: share on the left, download on the right, and everything you might add to the file — a comment, a request for sign-off, a note to the team, a new cut of a video — on the plus in the middle. The camera that took the shot moved up beside the filename where the rest of what the file is already lives, and the players wear a transport we drew ourselves, with the ten seconds a skip button jumps written on the button.

• Moving anything stopped taking time

  Dragging a folder into another Area used to copy every frame and every thumbnail across, then delete the originals. On a real shoot that meant minutes of waiting, with the library looking wrong the whole time it ran. Now the move changes a name and nothing else, so it finishes the moment you let go, at any size. Shares, comments and pinned tiles all still point at the right files afterwards.

• Made for the hand as well as the desk

  The phone had been a smaller version of the desktop, which is the wrong shape for a thumb. Where you are now sits along the top and what you can do sits along the bottom, on one action bar that follows you from the file browser into a preview, so share, add and download stay in the same place and stay in reach. The dialogs that used to interrupt with a system alert now ask in the page, beside the thing they are asking about.

• Redrawn around one blue

  Every surface redrawn around a single Mediterranean blue, with a great deal taken away. Solid blue now marks one thing only, which is where you are. The small capitals retreated to the places that genuinely are labels, and the hairline rules that used to fence everything in have gone. The emails got the same treatment; they had been wearing somebody else's design.

• Keep what someone sent you

  A transfer that arrives from Vidual Send can now be saved straight into an Area without a download-and-re-upload detour, and a zip that lands in Stowary can be opened out into a real folder in place, with the archive left alone. Both run in the background, so a slow one never holds up the page.

July 2026

• Straight from Lightroom and Capture One

  The two editors our photographers live in now hand their work to Stowary without a detour. Connect once, and Export in Lightroom Classic — or Publish in Capture One — sends your selects at full resolution straight into an Area, subfolders and all, with nothing to drag and nothing to re-upload. They’re sitting in Stowary by the time the export dialog has closed.

June 2026

• All our AI, run by us, in Europe

  We finished what we started: every piece of intelligence in Stowary — reading your documents, making them searchable, picking out the names and dates — now runs on open models we operate ourselves, in the EU. No part of your work is handed to a third-party AI company, trained on, or mined. We wrote up why it mattered enough to bother, in the journal: “A mind of our own”.

• It notices the dates you’d forget

  Stowary now reads the contracts and invoices you upload and quietly gathers what’s coming up — a licence that lapses, a renewal that auto-charges, an invoice ageing past its terms — onto one calm page. A noticer, never a nag, and every line names the file it came from.

• Our own AI, your files in the EU

  Two load-bearing moves. The model that makes your work searchable is now one we host and run ourselves — no forwarding of your files to a big provider — and your files now live on EU infrastructure in Amsterdam. Nothing you upload trains a model, ours or anyone’s.

• Stowary in the light

  A proper light mode to sit beside the dark — light, dark, or following your system, and it sticks across visits. Every surface tuned to read cleanly either way.

• Vectors you can see

  SVG and vector files now preview in place, safely rasterised, so you can eyeball a logo or an icon set without downloading a thing.

• Keep what you need offline

  In the Mac app, pin a file or a whole folder to hold it on your disk for offline; the rest stays on-demand, so the library lives in Finder without ever filling the drive.

• Uploads that don’t tie you to the page

  Start a big upload and wander off — check Activity, start a Select, open another folder — and it keeps climbing in the background, with a small dock to tell you where it’s up to. Only closing the tab can interrupt it now.

• Did your share land?

  Every share link keeps its own record: how many times it was opened, whether the files were taken, and a nudge the first time someone reaches it. The end of wondering whether the email even arrived.

• A word on what changed

  When you upload a new cut, you can leave a note — “lifted the shadows, new grade” — and it’s kept with the version and dropped straight into the review timeline.

• Take the whole folder

  Download an entire folder, subfolders and all, as a single zip — straight from the app or from a share page.

• At home on a phone

  A thorough pass over the small screen: tidier toolbars, calmer menus, and the rough edges sanded off across the board.

May 2026

• Review film where it lives

  Timestamped comments welded to the exact frame, versions side by side, and a resolve handshake so a note gets addressed instead of argued in circles.

• Shoot Selects

  Put the shortlist in front of the team and let everyone vote without seeing who picked what — the room’s real preference, without the politics.

• Tidy

  A read-only eye on the duplicates and the long-untouched files, and how much space sits behind them. It never deletes a thing; you decide.

• Search the way you remember

  Ask in plain language and search reaches into what was in the frame, where and when it was taken, the camera and the lens — not the exact filename.

• It lives in Finder

  A native Mac app with on-demand sync: the whole library sitting in Finder, there to open in an instant, without filling the disk.

• Yours, and accountable

  Owner-only areas you can seal to yourself, an activity trail you can read back, and a recoverable trash that holds anything deleted for thirty days.