Events, people and places, from the drive you already have. Nothing gets moved or uploaded.
Free to try on your whole drive · $59 once ($59.99 on the Mac App Store) to unlock · macOS 14+, Apple silicon
Or get it from the Mac App Store
The early folders had names. After about 2016 it was mostly phone backups nobody had opened. We didn't want to upload it anywhere to get it sorted, so we wrote an app that reads it in place.
Titles each event with the date, the place and what happened, in the style of your own folders.
Every photo of one person, in order, from baby pictures on.
Anniversaries and "this week in 2011" photos show up on their own.
Type "orange juice" or "the blue house" and it finds matching photos.
Hide any photo behind a password.
A map of everywhere the photos were taken. Works offline.
Also in the app: a Fun Box for when the family's over, and Apple Watch albums. All features →
It learns from folders you did name, like 2012-04 Theo's 1st Easter, and names the rest to match.
Twenty years of photos, studied on one Mac: people across the decades, events named for you, search that understands a birthday cake.
Demo archive: free Pexels photos, made-up names.
Searching “reading to the kids.”
Nothing is uploaded. Optional Family Circle sharing is end-to-end encrypted.
Free to try. Pay once to see everything.
Want relatives in other cities to see the archive too? Family Circle adds end-to-end encrypted sharing for $49 a year. It's a subscription because it runs on a server.
No. It 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 the app, not in your folders.
It needs an Apple silicon Mac (M1 or later) on macOS 14 or newer, and 8 GB of memory is enough. The first read of the drive is the only heavy part: a 300,000-photo archive on an ordinary USB hard drive takes about one night, and an SSD is up to 10× faster. After that it browses like a document viewer, and you can unplug the drive and keep browsing thumbnails. The index takes a few gigabytes on your Mac.
Yes. The app never writes to your drive, but one drive is still one fire or one failure away from gone. Keep three copies on at least two kinds of storage, with one somewhere else. Here's the 3-2-1 rule for family photos, and a guide to getting everything off your iPhone.
No. Scanning, understanding, naming, browsing, even the Places map: 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 optional street-detail layer if you leave it on (never your photos, names, or anything else about your archive). The privacy policy lists every one.
Free to try. $59 once to unlock everything ($59.99 on the Mac App Store).
307 MB · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon
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