Every family has a hard drive like this: twenty years of photos, lovingly named folders in the early years, then giant unlabeled phone-backup dumps once life got busy. All Our Years reads all of them, in place, and gives you back the story of your family's life.
Photos don't disappear. They just stop being looked at.
Every family has a hard drive like this: lovingly named folders in the early years ("2012-04 Theo's 1st Easter"), then giant unlabeled phone-backup dumps once life got busy. The photos are saved but never seen again. Nobody deleted anything, the drive is fine. It's just unbrowsable. And what's locked in there isn't data. It's first steps and last visits, weddings and ordinary Sundays, the whole record of a family becoming itself. The photo apps that came with your devices can't rescue it: they're wonderful with a camera roll, but twenty years of moments on a drive was never their job, and libraries that size make them strain, even on a fast machine.
2004 – 2016 · the years you curated
2008-06 Beach Trip with the Cousins
2012-04 Theo's 1st Easter
2015-12 Christmas Morning at Home
2017 – today · the years the phone won
Alex's iPhone Backup 2019-03-11 → 2019-06-02
Sam's iPhone Backup 2021-07-02 → 2021-11-19
IMG_4471.HEIC · IMG_4472.HEIC · … 61,208 more
Sound familiar? The naming stopped, but the living didn't. The best decade of your family's story is the one with no labels on it.
Not a photo manager
A storyteller, built for the Mac
Search boxes and face grids already exist. All Our Years is for the question they can't answer: what happened to us?
Events named in your voice
All Our Years learns from the folders you did name and titles the rest the way you would have: dates, places, and what actually happened. It also notices your family's recurring traditions (birthdays, anniversaries, the trips you take every year) and lines them up together across every year they happened.
A timeline for every person
Watch anyone grow up in one continuous scroll, from hospital blanket to high school, assembled from every photo they ever appeared in.
Moments that find you
"This week in 2011." "It's been ten years since this trip." All Our Years brings the archive to you, so seeing your photos stops requiring a search.
Search by what's in the photo
Not just filenames and dates: type "cake," "beach," or "the blue house" and All Our Years finds it by what's actually pictured, understood entirely on your Mac.
Private, even from the rest of the family
Hide anything behind its own password, right from the lightbox. Nothing is deleted: it just stops showing up, until you unlock it again.
Gigabytes or terabytes: no problem
iCloud and Google Photos both cap your free storage, then bill you every month once you're over. All Our Years doesn't care if your archive is 50GB or 5TB: it's already on your drive, so there's nothing to upload, no monthly fee, and no "storage full" warning, ever again.
Places we've been
A real zoomable map with a pin for every place your archive has been, sized by how many photos are there. Hover in close and see the photos themselves. The one feature here that talks to the internet: it loads map tiles, never your photos.
Theo's 1st Easter. Beach Trip with the Cousins. Then the phone dumps took over, and the naming stopped. All Our Years learns your naming voice from the years you curated, and applies it to the decade you didn't.
What's on the drive
IMG_8203.HEIC IMG_8207.HEIC IMG_8214.MOV IMG_8226.HEIC + 143 more · Apr 12–13, 2019 · same backyard
What All Our Years sees
One event · 147 photos, 3 videos Grandma & Grandpa's backyard
Whole family present · eggs in 31 shots
Suggested name, in your style2019-04 Easter at Grandma's
Getting started
Point it at the drive. That's the whole setup.
All Our Years works with the archive you already have, exactly where it is. No importing, no reorganizing, no upload bar that says "11 days remaining."
1
Study
All Our Years reads your drive in place: dates, places, cameras, folder names, every photo and video. It opens your archive strictly read-only and never writes a byte to it.
2
Understand
On your Mac, All Our Years groups photos into events, learns who's who, and figures out what each moment was: a birthday, a first day of school, an ordinary Sunday that mattered.
3
Tell
Browse your life as stories: named events, a timeline for every person, and a "this week in 2009" that surfaces moments you forgot you had.
Before anything runs
First, it shows you the plan. You approve it.
After a quick file count, before a single photo is opened, All Our Years lays out exactly what's about to happen: the hardware it detected, how long each stage will take, how big its index will be, and the promise it makes about your originals. Nothing starts until you say so.
All Our Years
313,861 photos · 5,214 videos
1998–2026, 28 years · 1.92 TB on an external drive, measured just now at 142 MB/s
The first study runs in the background and will take about 8–16 hours. Browsing opens within the first minute.
What it has to work with
Apple M2 Pro, 10 cores, 16 GB memory. The study uses at most about half your cores, caps its own memory, and backs off whenever your Mac is busy, hot, or running low.
What will happen, in order
1Catalog every file
Dates, cameras, and places, to build the timeline.
about 1–3 hrs
2Create browsing thumbnails
Browsing opens as the first batch lands, minutes in.
Times are estimates from measuring your drive on the spot; they firm up as the study runs.
Where the index will live
The index (database + thumbnails) will grow to roughly 8 GB, a sliver (under 1%) of your 1.92 TB archive. Your photos stay on their own drive either way.
This Mac's default storage
212 GB free · SSD · recommended
~/Library/Application Support/All Our Years
Choose a different location…
an SSD works best, e.g. a second internal drive
While it runs
A background study. Keep using your Mac, or walk away.
Browse within the first minute; nothing waits for the study to finish.
As stages finish, you're invited to add optional touches, like naming faces. All skippable.
Quit anytime. It picks up exactly where it left off next launch.
Your originals are never touched
The archive is opened strictly to read it: never written to, renamed, moved, or edited. Deleting the index never touches a photo.
Nothing starts until you say so. Starting means this plan looks right to you.
← BackLooks good, start studying →
A faithful recreation of the pre-study screen, restyled to match this page. The numbers are the app's own: it measures your drive on the spot and shows you its actual plan.
See it in action
What "Tell" actually looks like
The app's actual interface, rendered live from its real code. Photos and names are swapped for stock art and made-up names, never a real family's archive.
All Our Years
Events named in your voice, a family strip, "on this day," and the full grid: Family, Duplicates, Videos, Sharing, and the Fun Box one tab away.
All Our Years · Theo
Photos
Videos
People
Places
Events
Duplicates
Sharing
✦ Fun Box
Settings
People
Theo
Every photo he's ever appeared in, in order · 2013 – 2026
2013
Newborn
2015
Age 2
2018
Age 5
2021
Age 8
2023
Age 10
2026
Today
Illustration of the person-timeline feature (the age-drift face chaining behind it isn't something a static screenshot shows well).
Icing on the cake
The Fun Box: extra, playful, entirely optional
All Our Years' job is giving your family's story back to you. The Fun Box is just for laughs: a handful of playful extras built on top of the same archive, for whenever you want to goof around instead of go deep.
All Our Years · Fun Box
The real Fun Box hub: no stand-ins here, every tile shown is exactly what it looks like.
Fun Box · Family web
New: the Family Web. The whole family, people and pets, as one living web that grows year by year. Drawn exactly as the app draws it, with a made-up family standing in for yours.
Slideshow
Slideshow: stock photo + made-up caption standing in for a real one.
Guess the year
Guess the year: same stand-in, mid-round.
Face morph
Watch someone age across two decades of photos in one smooth blend, from first birthday to last summer, in a few seconds.
Slideshow
Anyone's whole story, playing on its own: Apple-style pans and fades over their timeline, no clicking required. Good for the TV during a family visit.
Guess the year
Family quiz night, no screens required: All Our Years pulls a run of real photos, everyone writes down a guess on paper, then a Reveal screen shows every answer at once. Turns out grandpa remembers 1998 better than anyone.
Fun facts
Busiest years, recurring dates, who shows up the most: the trivia your archive has been quietly keeping track of.
One day a year
Birthdays, Mother's/Father's Day, or any date you pick: one photo a year, every year it happened, side by side.
Mosaic poster
Turn one photo into a poster built from thousands of tiny archive photos. Preview it instantly, then generate a print-grade hi-res image to hang on a wall.
Word cloud
Pets, places, everyday things: a cloud of everything the archive keeps seeing, sized by how often it shows up. Filter by person or year, then click through to the matching photos.
Companion for everyone
A lightweight phone-friendly view the whole household can open on the home Wi-Fi: no separate app, no account, just the fun parts.
None of it touches your archive, and none of it is required. The Fun Box is a bonus tab, not the main event.
Privacy
Runs on your Mac. Ends on your Mac.
These are your children, your parents, your whole life. That's not something to stream to someone else's data center. All Our Years was built local-first: not as a feature, as a principle.
Your drive is opened read-only. All Our Years never writes to it, by design, not by promise.
Nothing is uploaded. All understanding happens on your Mac.
No account. No subscription standing between you and your own life.
Unplug the internet and All Our Years won't notice. The one exception is the Places map, which loads background map tiles (never your photos or data).
Redundancy
One drive is not a backup plan.
Local-first means All Our Years is fast and free to run: no subscription, no upload queue, no bandwidth bill. But a single drive is one fire, one theft, or one hardware failure away from zero. The fix isn't the cloud. It's redundancy you control.
3
Copies
Your original plus at least two backups. Losing one drive should never mean losing a memory.
2
Kinds of media
Not two drives from the same failed batch. Mix brands, ages, or drive types so one bad model can't take out everything at once.
1
Copy offsite
A relative's house, a safe-deposit box: anywhere but the one room that could flood, burn, or get broken into.
All Our Years works the same on any drive you point it at, primary or backup, so checking what's actually on each copy takes minutes, not a full re-scan of your memory.
The study, that first overnight read of your whole drive, is the only heavy lift. Once the understanding is built, All Our Years is a lightweight viewer sitting on a local index, and the requirements fall off a cliff.
During the study: one night
Every day after
Mac
Built for Apple silicon. The Neural Engine does the face and scene work: an M-series Mac studies a 300,000-photo archive overnight. Apple silicon (M1 or later) is required.
Any supported Mac feels instant. Browsing is reading a local index, not crunching photos: an M1 Air and an M3 Ultra feel the same.
Memory
8 GB is enough. The study caps its own footprint and yields the moment you need your Mac. 16 GB or more lets it run more workers in parallel and finish sooner.
Negligible. Day to day, All Our Years idles like a document viewer.
Your photo drive
The drive sets the pace. Keep it plugged in, ideally directly over USB. An SSD archive studies up to ~10× faster than a spinning drive; a network volume is the slowest class. The founding 314,391-file archive sat on a plain USB hard drive: one night.
Optional. Unplug it and put it back in the closet: you keep browsing everything from thumbnails and previews. Plug it in again for full resolution and video.
Your Mac's SSD
A few gigabytes free. Thumbnails for a 300,000-photo archive run about 3–4 GB, plus the index: a small fraction of the archive itself, kept on the internal disk so nothing waits on the drive.
Same footprint, growing slowly as previews cache. All of it disposable and rebuildable. Your originals were never touched.
Internet
None. Nothing uploads, nothing downloads: the study runs the same on a plane.
Still none. Home Wi-Fi matters only for household viewing and the iPhone companion, and that traffic never leaves your house.
← swipe to see more →
That's the payoff of doing the understanding up front: the hard work happens once, overnight, then the archive is just there, light enough for any Mac in the house.
Pricing
Buy once. Own it. No landlord.
This audience already pays for tools like this: Mylio Photos+ runs $240 a year, Excire Foto $249 one-time. All Our Years is bought once, not rented: $59 for the first 500 families, $99 after, and your archive never comes with a subscription attached.
All Our Years Free
$0
No time limit
Full study of your whole drive, full quality
Browse the first 100 photos of every year, and the 10 earliest videos
Rest of the archive browsable, blurred until unlocked
Launch pricing, published in full: the free version is yours to keep: point it at your archive and browse a real slice of it, no time limit. Unlocking everything is $59 one-time (family pack $79) for the first 500 families; after that it rises to $99 ($129 family). The whole ladder is published now so nothing changes under you later: the earlier you're here, the less you pay, and whatever you pay, it's yours for good.
Questions
Answered
Will it change my files or folders?
No. All Our Years opens your archive read-only and keeps its index and thumbnails on your Mac's internal disk. Your drive stays byte-for-byte exactly as you left it. Suggested event names live in All Our Years, not in your folders.
How big an archive can it handle?
All Our Years was built on a real family drive: 314,391 photos and videos, 1.7 TB, spanning 28 years (1998–2026). If yours is bigger, we'd love to hear about it.
What about photos with no dates or locations?
Messaging-app saves and old scans often arrive stripped of metadata. All Our Years places them using every clue that survives: file history, the folder they live in, and the events happening around them.
Does it handle videos?
Yes. All Our Years reads dates and locations directly from video files themselves, so the clip of the first steps lands in the same event as the photos of them.
Does it need the internet?
No. Scanning, understanding, naming, browsing: all of it runs on your Mac and works the same on a plane as it does at home. The network is touched only for housekeeping: checking for app updates, activating a paid license, and the Places map's tile images (never your photos, names, or anything else about your archive). The privacy policy lists every one.
The story is already on the drive. All Our Years reads it back to you.
Free to browse, right now, at the $59 launch price to unlock everything.