Frequently asked questions

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 becomes browsable early while the deeper study continues in the background, so you're not waiting for the whole archive to finish before seeing anything.

No. All Our Years is a one-time purchase: $59 for up to 3 Macs, or $79 for a Family Pack covering up to 5 Macs. There's no recurring charge and no expiration.

The free version runs the full study on your whole archive, but browsing shows only the first 100 photos of every year and the 10 earliest videos; the rest is blurred until you unlock. Buying lifts the blur permanently 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.

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.

Three things, and nothing else: a static file fetch to check for app updates, your license key during activation or deactivation (sent once per Mac, to Polar), and, only if you leave its switch on, the Places map's optional street-detail imagery (never your photos, names, or anything else about your archive). The map itself works without it; see the next question.

No. The world map is bundled inside the app, so Places works with no internet connection at all: no map account, no API key, nothing fetched. If you want street-level detail when zoomed in close, an optional "Street detail (online)" layer loads background map imagery from a public map service; it's one switch in the map's corner, and turning it off means the map makes zero network requests.

No. Search-by-meaning runs entirely on-device, using your Mac's own hardware. No photo or search query ever leaves your Mac.

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. Then there's a one-time hookup Apple doesn't 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 never published for third-party apps. It works today (the person you send it to just taps "Add to Apple Watch," no app needed on their end), and we're still validating it across watch models, but a future watchOS update could stop accepting these files, and Apple owes us no warning. That's why it's labeled beta, and why the auto-syncing album is the long-term path for your own watch.

No, that's the scale it's built for. The library is browsable within minutes while the deeper study keeps running in the background.

Yes. The study can be paused and safely survives unplugging the drive, reboots, and app restarts. It picks back 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.