Getting started, buying, privacy, Apple Watch and troubleshooting.
An Apple silicon Mac (M1 or later) running macOS 14 or later. Point it at any folder or external drive of photos and videos, no importing required.
Both. All Our Years works with any folder or external drive of photos and videos, exactly where they already sit. It never modifies or writes to that drive; the app's own index and thumbnails live on your Mac's internal disk instead.
Follow the step-by-step iPhone guide: it walks through offloading a full camera roll — HEIC, Live Photos, videos and all — onto a Mac or external drive, ready for All Our Years to read.
Minutes, even for archives of 300,000+ files. The library is browsable early while the app keeps reading in the background. The first full read of the developer's own drive (314,391 photos and videos) took about one night over USB.
No for the app. Family Circle sharing is an optional $49/year add-on. The app itself is a one-time purchase: $59 for up to 3 Macs, or $79 for a Family Pack covering up to 5 Macs, with no expiration. See pricing. On the Mac App Store the unlock is $59.99 once and covers every Mac signed in with your Apple ID; the Family Pack is for the direct download.
The free version has no time limit and reads your whole drive. You can view 100 photos from every year and the 10 earliest videos in full; everything else is visible but blurred. Buying lifts the blur across your entire archive.
Buy a license, and a key is emailed to you. Paste it into All Our Years' Settings and the blur lifts right away. Activation happens once per Mac; after that, this Mac stays unlocked even offline, forever. To move a license to a different Mac, deactivate the old seat in Settings first.
Both are the same app. The Mac App Store version is free to use and unlocks with a one-time in-app purchase, and it updates through the App Store. The direct download updates inside the app and unlocks with a license key: $59 for up to 3 Macs or $79 for 5 Macs. Refunds for App Store purchases go through Apple; direct purchases have a 14-day refund.
No. All processing happens on-device, and the app opens your photo drive strictly read-only. See the full Privacy Policy for exactly what does and doesn't touch the network.
Update checks, license activation (your license key, once per Mac, to Polar) and the optional street-detail layer on the Places map. None of these include your photos, names or faces. If you turn on Family Circle, it sends end-to-end encrypted data to the relatives you share with. The app has no analytics. The website uses Google Analytics; see the Privacy Policy.
No. The world map is bundled inside the app, so Places works offline. An optional "Street detail (online)" layer loads street-level map tiles from a public map service when you zoom in close. It is one switch in the map's corner, and with it off the map makes no network requests.
No. Search by meaning runs on your Mac. No photo or search query leaves it.
The Apple Watch tab curates a small album (up to 24 photos) straight from your archive: the family, a growing-up timeline, occasions, pets, scenery, or a custom hand-pick. You review every photo in a real watch crop, with the clock drawn over the top so you can see it never covers a face. Then you deliver it one of two ways: an auto-syncing Apple Photos album for your own watch, or a shareable watch face file for family (beta).
All Our Years creates and maintains an album in Apple Photos on your Mac (it asks for Photos permission once). iCloud Photos carries that album to your iPhone, so it must be enabled on both the Mac and the iPhone. This option uses your own iCloud Photos. You then do a one-time hookup that Apple does not let apps automate: open the Watch app on your iPhone, choose a Photos watch face, and pick the album under Sync Album. After that, every re-sync from your Mac flows to the watch on its own.
The shareable watch face file uses a format Apple has not published for third-party apps. It works today, and the person you send it to just taps "Add to Apple Watch" with no app needed. We are still testing it across watch models, and a future watchOS update could stop accepting these files, so it is labeled beta. The auto-syncing album is the long-term option for your own watch.
No, that is the scale it was built for. The app was developed on a drive of 314,391 photos and videos. The first full read takes about one night over USB, and the library is browsable within minutes.
Yes. The read can be paused and survives unplugging the drive, reboots and app restarts. It picks up where it left off.
Yes, with guest sharing: scan a QR code and anyone on your home Wi-Fi can view the library from their phone. It's view-only, and no photos are copied anywhere in the process.