v0.1.20 · macOS 26 · MIT

Background,
gone.

The UNIX-style background remover for macOS. Apple Vision, on-device. No cloud, no API keys, no GUI side-effects.

$ brew install Arthur-Ficial/tap/bgbgone

Apple Silicon · macOS 26+ · source on GitHub

inout

Every flag · drag any slider

Twenty-five motives. One CLI.

Each slider below is one bgbgone capability on a different NASA / ESA / Wikimedia public-domain subject. None of these subjects appear in the bgbgone README. Drag the divider — both panels are encoded at identical pixel dimensions, so the subject stays in place during the reveal.

Composite gallery

Anywhere × anything.

Each tile is one bgbgone subject.jpg --bg image:scene.jpg -o panel.jpg. Forty-nine pairings of public-domain spaceflight subjects (astronauts, spacecraft, planets, moons) onto public-domain galaxies, nebulae, and planetary surfaces.

How it works

Apple Vision in a UNIX pipe.

Every Mac since macOS 14 ships VNGenerateForegroundInstanceMaskRequest — only callable from Swift. bgbgone is the thin, hard-tested CLI that wraps it.

~/photos

# single cutout to a transparent PNG
$ bgbgone photo.jpg > out.png

# brand background, JPEG, tight crop, soft edge
$ bgbgone selfie.jpg --bg color:#0066cc --crop --feather 2 \
    --to jpg --quality 95 -o avatar.jpg

# batch a folder, stream NDJSON for jq
$ ls *.heic | xargs -I{} bgbgone {} --ndjson --out-dir ./out/ \
    | jq -s 'group_by(.algo) | map({algo: .[0].algo, n: length})'

# pipe into auge for cleaner downstream classification
$ bgbgone in.jpg --bg color:black --to jpg -o /tmp/c.jpg \
    && auge --classify /tmp/c.jpg --top 3

network calls

NetworkGuard intercepts http / https / ws / wss inside the process and exits with code 3 if anything tries.

tests passing

60 unit tests on the pure-Swift core. 15 integration tests spawning the real binary across 16 PD fixtures.

86 ms

avg per image

100-image perf harness: 11.6 images/s on Apple Silicon.

Install

One brew tap. Two minutes.

Apple Silicon, macOS 26+. No Xcode required.

Homebrew

brew tap Arthur-Ficial/tap
brew install Arthur-Ficial/tap/bgbgone

bgbgone --version
bgbgone --check
bgbgone photo.jpg > cutout.png

Already installed? brew upgrade bgbgone.

From source

git clone https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/bgbgone
cd bgbgone
make install

Regenerate README assets with make readme-images; ship with make release.

Sibling tools

Part of the apfel ecosystem.

On-device CLI tools for the Apple frameworks Apple never wrapped. Each one is one binary, one purpose.

Tool	Capability	Apple framework
apfel	LLM (text generation)	FoundationModels
auge	Vision / OCR	Vision
bgbgone (this)	Background removal	Vision + Core Image
ohr	Speech-to-text	SpeechAnalyzer
kern	Embeddings	NLContextualEmbedding