A First Look at Lingo

Lingo is a new Mac app launched by the people from the Noun Project. It’s designed to be a simple app to store and quickly browse for visual assets for your projects. The app supports photos, illustrations, icons, and any other visual asset.

Pricing is free for a personal plan, and if you’d like to share your library with a team, then you will need a paid package starting at $9.99 a month. All plans store your assets in their cloud and off your hard drive.

To get items into the app, you can drag and drop them from Finder or use the more traditional file upload tool. Once uploaded you can then drag them into folders in the sidebar for categorization. Plus you can edit the description and tags for easier finding later.

Lingo doesn’t have any integration for finding all your existing assets and the easiest way I found to find all of yours is by using an advanced search in Finder.

Besides having simple access to all your assets, it includes drag and drop exporting to many popular apps including Sketch, Keynote, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more.

For a first release, it seems solid, and I didn’t run into any problems with the fundamental operations. Where I would like to see it improve is tighter integration with the Noun project, so I wouldn’t need the second app to find icons.

I’m also not enthusiastic on being forced to use their cloud service with no option of using your Dropbox account or Google Drive.

Overall I do like this app to help stay organized. I have “stuff” everywhere on my Mac, and this will help save me time the next time I’m looking for a particular image.

You can find out more and download the app from the Lingo website.