Huex

iOS app that pulls colour palettes out of your photos, sorts the library by hue and exports photo-plus-palette images, all on-device.

Year
2026
Role
Solo developer
Kind
Personal
Status
Shipped
Links
App Store · Source

Problem

A photo library holds a lot of colour but gives no way to browse by it. Averaging pixels gives muddy results, and uploading a whole library for analysis is not acceptable.

What I built

Huex analyses every photo in the library on the device, extracts dominant colours in perceptual colour spaces, names them from a colour dictionary, groups the library into colour buckets and renders shareable images pairing a photo with its palette. Nothing leaves the phone.

Decisions & trade-offs

  • Palette extraction in Lab, LCh and OKLCh instead of RGB averages, to avoid muddy colours.
  • All analysis on the device: nothing is uploaded.
  • Background library scan and bucketing that keeps the UI responsive on large libraries.

Highlights

  • Palette extraction in Lab/LCh/OKLCh colour spaces with Accelerate, avoiding muddy averages
  • Background library scan and colour bucketing that keeps the UI responsive
  • Colour-name lookup from a large dictionary
  • Share-sheet export of photo + palette strip rendered in-app
  • Published on the App Store; AGPL-3.0; on-device only, privacy policy linked

Stack

  • Swift 6
  • SwiftUI
  • PhotoKit
  • Accelerate
  • Lab / LCh / OKLCh colour spaces