Project notes
A closer look at the design decisions, technical choices, and problems this project was built to solve.
Building a private visual content studio for iPhone
PostLens helps people choose strong photos, improve them with explainable edits, compose social-ready layouts, and export the result. Its workflow is intentionally narrow: Select → Enhance → Compose → Export.
Scheduling, connected accounts, analytics, and engagement tracking stay outside the product. That boundary lets the app focus on the creative work while keeping the first version local to the iPhone.
Goals
- Make photo selection easier with useful scoring that does not upload a library to a private server.
- Keep edits understandable through measured signals and bounded adjustment recipes.
- Support real publishing formats without locking a photo into one destination or crop.
- Treat privacy, accessibility, and localization as product features rather than release notes.
What I built
- A progressive scored gallery that prioritizes visible photos, analyzes local assets in battery-aware batches, and reuses a private on-device index.
- An editing workflow that measures exposure, contrast, saturation, color balance, clipping, and sharpness before applying predictable looks.
- A tailored AI look that searches bounded candidates, validates the result, frames a Vision-guided crop, and drafts an editable grounded caption.
- Layouts and carousels for reusable social formats, publishing sets, profile grids, and still-frame video export.
- Optional Apple integrations for Foundation Models coaching and per-use Image Playground handoff on supported devices.
- An Astro landing and support site in English and Spanish.
Technical highlights
- Native stack:
SwiftUI,PhotoKit,PhotosPicker,Vision,Core Image,StoreKit, and Apple system sharing. - On-device intelligence: local scoring, bounded preview re-analysis, subject-aware framing, and caption preparation.
- Privacy boundaries: no PostLens upload server, metadata-free saved copies, and explicit disclosure before optional Apple generative workflows.
- Release quality: privacy manifests, source-size checks, native tests, SEO checks, and a release preflight.
Results
- A complete free single-photo workflow from library review to format-specific export.
- Optional supporter features that add multi-photo and publishing workflows without gating privacy, accessibility, scoring, or core editing.
- A clear product boundary that keeps PostLens a visual studio instead of another social account dashboard.
Why it matters
Creative tools can be helpful without becoming opaque. PostLens combines on-device measurement, predictable adjustments, and optional system intelligence while keeping the user in control of the final image and caption.
