A Mac-native image annotator that ships SAM 3 on your laptop
RectLabel is a commercial macOS app whose support repo reveals an unusually deep stack of offline ML models for labeling images and video.

What it does RectLabel is an offline image annotation tool for object detection and segmentation, distributed as a paid Mac app with a free tier. This repository is its public support channel—issues, feature requests, and documentation—rather than open-source code. The README functions as a feature list and marketing page for the App Store downloads.
The interesting bit The app integrates a surprising breadth of models locally: Segment Anything 2 and 3 for polygon and pixel labeling, Cellpose for biological segmentation, Core ML models including RF-DETR and YOLO26 for auto-labeling, plus tracking and OCR. That’s a lot of neural network inference running offline on Apple hardware, not a web service with usage caps.
Key highlights
- Supports bounding boxes, polygons, pixels, oriented bounding boxes, cubic Bézier curves, keypoints with skeletons, and point annotations
- Auto-labeling via SAM 3 text/box prompts, SAM 2, Cellpose, Core ML detection models, and a tracking model
- Exports to YOLO, COCO, CreateML, and DOTA formats; also exports indexed color and grayscale masks
- Includes video frame extraction, image augmentation, gallery search across objects/attributes/filenames/memos, and configurable hotkeys
- Two App Store tiers: RectLabel and RectLabel Pro (pricing not listed in repo)
Caveats
- The app is macOS-only and distributed through the App Store, not open source; this repo contains no code to inspect or build from
- “Jupyter Notebook” as the listed repository language is misleading—there appear to be no notebooks in the README
- Several listed features (YOLO26, RF-DETR) are mentioned without version specificity or performance claims
Verdict Mac-owning ML engineers who need offline, format-flexible annotation and want SAM-powered auto-labeling without cloud dependencies should evaluate the free tier. Windows and Linux users, open-source purists, and anyone wanting to self-host or modify the tool are out of luck.