GETTING STARTED

Your first launch

Four screens, each one skippable. Teserra creates nothing without asking.

1. Where should your library live?

Teserra proposes ~/Pictures/Teserra. Keep it, or choose any folder with Change…: an external drive, a folder inside iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Give the library a name if you like several.

Synced folders. A vault in iCloud Drive or Dropbox works, and Teserra warns you about one thing: let the sync finish before opening the same vault on a second Mac. The format is built to merge, but two half-synced copies are still two copies.

2. What goes in your library?

  • Start from nothing and add things as you go.
  • From a folder of images. Teserra counts what it finds before touching anything, then copies the files in.
  • From another app. Point at an Eagle library and Teserra recognizes it. Details →
  • Try the demo. A curated set of images, fonts, a video and a few pages lands in this vault. Remove them later in one click from Vaults.

3. Search inside your images

A small visual model, about 290 MB, downloads once and runs on your Mac. It is what lets you type “marble statue, side light” and get the picture. Continue once it is installed, or Skip for now and install it later from Settings → Add-ons → Visual search. Nothing leaves your Mac either way.

4. Capture your screen

To capture screenshots with ⌘⇧M, macOS needs to grant Teserra the Screen Recording permission, which macOS 15 labels “Screen & System Audio Recording”. It is one permission, not two. Teserra opens the right pane, detects when you switch it on, and offers Relaunch if macOS requires it. You can do this later, the first time you press the shortcut.

The scary dialog. On macOS 15 and later, every screenshot app triggers a system dialog about “bypassing the system private window picker” the first time it captures. The words are Apple's, the behavior is normal. More on the Support page →

Then

A single bar, Preparing your library, covers import, thumbnails and the visual index. Search works as soon as it is done, and tells you if the index is still building. You can rerun the welcome any time from an empty vault.

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