Apple Photos is the default answer for most people, for a simple reason: it comes free on every device, it's genuinely well made, and its automatic face and location grouping is excellent. The question worth asking isn't whether Apple Photos is good — it clearly is — it's whether it's solving the same problem you actually have. A rolling camera roll and a twenty-year family archive several people contributed to are not the same problem, and Apple Photos was built for the first one.
Where your photos actually live
The single biggest structural difference between the two is where your original files end up.
Apple Photos
Imports files into its own managed library, synced through iCloud
All Our Years
Reads your existing folders in place, on your own drive — nothing moved or uploaded
That one difference cascades into almost everything else below. An import-based library is easiest at the start and gets harder to leave the longer you stay. A read-in-place tool has a slightly less "magic" first five minutes and stays exactly as easy to walk away from in year ten as it was on day one.
Where Apple Photos wins outright
Worth saying plainly, because a comparison that only flatters one side isn't useful to anyone deciding between them:
- It's free and already installed on every Apple device your family owns.
- Automatic sync across devices — take a photo on your phone, it's on your Mac and iPad within seconds, no manual step.
- Live Photos, editing, and sharing are all first-class, built directly into the same app you're already using to take the photo.
- It's the right tool for a rolling camera roll — the day-to-day stream of new photos a family generates, which is a genuinely different job from organizing decades of photos that already exist.
Where a family archive strains Apple Photos
| What matters for an archive | Apple Photos | All Our Years |
|---|---|---|
| Existing folder structure | Not preserved as organization — Photos uses its own album/date model | Read directly; a folder named "2019-07-04 Lake House" becomes an event with that name |
| Multiple contributors, years apart | Built around one Apple ID's library | Built to read a shared drive several people already added photos to over time |
| Face tracking across childhood | Strong within a library, tuned for typical usage | Tuned specifically for the same child's face changing over a decade or more |
| Cost as the archive grows | Paid iCloud storage, ongoing, scales with library size | One-time purchase |
| Leaving later | Full-fidelity export is a deliberate project | Nothing to export — files never left your drive |
What it actually looks like
All Our Years reads a drive, works out the events and people in it, and turns that into something browsable — without ever asking you to import anything into a separate library first.
The app's real interface, running on stock photos and made-up names — never a real family's archive.
Can you just use both?
For a lot of families, yes, and that's a perfectly reasonable answer. Apple Photos keeps doing what it's good at — new photos, synced instantly, edited and shared from the same app. All Our Years is pointed separately at the drive holding the decade(s) of photos that predate that rolling camera roll, or that live outside it entirely: old computers, inherited archives, digitized prints. Neither tool needs to know the other exists, because All Our Years never imports or touches what Photos owns.
FAQ
Can I use Apple Photos and All Our Years together?
Yes, and for a lot of families that's the actual right answer. Apple Photos for the rolling camera roll and iCloud sync; All Our Years for the archive of decades of photos already sitting in folders on a drive. They don't conflict, because All Our Years never touches or imports what Photos owns.
Does Apple Photos organize by folders?
Not the way Finder folders do. Photos organizes its own library by date and by albums you create inside the app; importing a folder doesn't preserve that folder's name as a label. Years of hand-named event folders don't carry into Photos automatically.
Is Apple Photos free?
The app is free on any Apple device. Storage isn't unlimited — once a library outgrows the free iCloud tier, keeping everything synced means paying for iCloud storage, indefinitely, as the archive grows.
What happens to my photos if I stop using iCloud?
Your originals are still yours, but a full, unmodified export out of Photos' library format is a deliberate project, not automatic — a different situation from files that never left your own folders to begin with.