Hi, I'm YellowMiso.
Look at your Mac. It unlocks. That's it.
A free little app that recognizes your face and types your password for you, so you don't have to.
Look at your Mac. It unlocks. That's it.
A free little app that recognizes your face and types your password for you, so you don't have to.
Why you'll like it
Open your Mac and glance at it. It unlocks in a second or two. Your password and Touch ID still work, always.
No account, no internet, no cloud. Your face and password never leave your Mac.
Step away and it locks itself. Come back and it unlocks. Like a watch, without the watch.
Dim rooms, glasses, even a mask: teach it each look once and it recognizes you.
Mac mini, iMac, Mac Studio, or a laptop closed at your desk: no Touch ID button? No problem.
No subscription, no ads, no strings.
How it works
Install it, let it see your face for a minute, and enter your Mac password once. It's stored encrypted, only on your Mac.
Press ⌃ ⌘ Q, close the lid, or walk away. Nothing new to learn.
YellowMiso recognizes you, checks that you're a real person and not a photo, types your password, and you're in.
Download YellowMiso for Mac
Download YellowMisoWant the most accurate recognition? Get the full version (about 90 MB, adds a second, larger face model). Faces you set up work in either one.
YellowMiso is a convenience, not a vault. It uses your Mac's ordinary webcam, not the special hardware behind Face ID, so it's not as secure as Face ID or Touch ID. It works hard to tell a real face from a photo or a phone screen, but no camera-only check is perfect: a very good replay, a deepfake or a lookalike may still get in. Use it to save time, keep a strong password, and don't rely on it to protect something a determined person wants.
YellowMiso.dmg finishes, double-click it (it's in your Downloads folder).
A window opens with YellowMiso and a shortcut to Applications.xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/YellowMiso.appYellowMiso opens as a small panel at the top of your screen (around the notch, or a pill on Macs without one) and walks you through these screens, in order.
YellowMiso can only unlock while it's running. Open it from the menu-bar icon → Settings → General and turn on Launch at login. If your Mac restarts, it starts by itself once you log in the first time. Until then you must use your password, since macOS asks for it after a restart anyway.
| Where | What it does |
|---|---|
| General → Enable Face Unlock | Master switch. |
| General → Triggers | When a scan starts: On wake (screen turns on), On lock (screen locks), On space (you press Space). |
| General → Display on | Which screen shows the panel. |
| General → Retry on notch hover | Hover the panel to try again. |
| General → Face detection duration | How many seconds one attempt looks for you. |
| General → Lock when I walk away | Off by default. When on, the Mac locks itself after you've been away for the delay you choose (30 seconds to 5 minutes), and your face unlocks it when you come back. It takes a brief look through the camera every few seconds while you're idle, so the camera light blinks. It never locks during video or presentations. |
| General → Animation | Show the unlock animation, and pick its style. |
| Status | A checklist of everything face unlock needs, and a Run test button that checks recognition and the fake-face score without typing anything. |
| Face | Your enrolled faces. Add another (+), recapture, delete, switch one off, or mark it as Wearing a mask. |
| Password | Change the saved password, lock or unlock the session, set how long before it auto-locks. |
| Camera | Choose which camera to use. |
| Recognition | How strict matching is and the fake-face (liveness) checks. |
A single profile can't be right for every look, so enroll separate ones.
More leniency also means a wrong person is slightly more likely to be accepted while that profile is on. Switch the profile off in Settings → Face if you don't want that.
That means macOS isn't letting YellowMiso type. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, select YellowMiso, click − to remove it, click + and add it again from Applications, switch it on, then quit and reopen YellowMiso. Do this whenever you replace the app with a new version.
YellowMiso brightens dark camera images, but a nearly black room still gives the camera too little to see. A little light on your face (even a dim lamp) helps a lot.
Bright light behind you or on glasses can look like a screen to the fake-face check. Face the camera, avoid strong backlight, and retry. You can also enroll another profile for that lighting (Masks section above works the same way).
Enter your login password and choose Always Allow. Current versions store their secrets in a private file instead and shouldn't ask.
YellowMiso writes a plain-text step log to:
~/Library/Application Support/YellowMisoUnlock/unlock.logIt records what happened on each attempt (matched, typed the password, retries, failures). It never contains your password, face images or keys. Send it when asking for help.
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/YellowMisoUnlockQuestions
No. YellowMiso has no network code at all. Recognition runs on your Mac using models bundled inside the app, and your data lives in one folder on your Mac that you can delete anytime.
It tries again on its own, up to 10 times. If it still can't, just type your password or use Touch ID as you always do. The Status tab in Settings tells you what's wrong and lets you test recognition.
It brightens dim images and handles most lighting. For glasses or a mask, add another face profile wearing them (Settings → Face → +), and switch on "Wearing a mask" for a mask profile. Nearly pitch-black rooms are hard for any webcam.
YellowMiso uses a trained model plus several checks to reject photos and phone or tablet screens, but it may not stop a very good fake. See "the limits" above.
Typing a password into the lock screen isn't something the App Store allows, and notarizing an app costs $99 a year. So it's a free download you open once with a right-click.
Quit it, drag it to the Trash, and delete the folder shown in the Uninstall section. Nothing else is left behind.