Photo tools tag faces and fill grids. All Our Years reads the drive you already have (in place, all on your Mac) and gives you back the story inside it.
| Apple & Google Photos | Self-hosted (Immich, PhotoPrism) |
Pro tools (Excire, Mylio) |
All Our Years | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your originals | Imported into their library | Copied to your server | Partially managed | Read in place. Never moved, never touched: the drive stays exactly as it is. |
| The cloud | Required or default-on | Your own server to run | Optional sync | None. Everything happens on your Mac. Unplug the internet: nothing changes. |
| Setup | Easy, then upload for days | Docker, configs, maintenance | Import and catalog | Point it at a drive. Browse within minutes; it keeps studying overnight. |
| What it understands | Tags and faces | Tags and faces | Tags and faces | Your story. Events, occasions, and names written in your own style. |
| How you browse | Grid + auto Memories | Grid | Grid | Timelines and moments: person arcs, "this week in 2009," instant slideshows. |
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Good tools, honestly compared: they solve different problems. All Our Years exists for the drive they all leave behind.
Apple Photos and Google Photos are excellent at what they do, and most families should keep using one of them for the photos they take today. All Our Years isn't a replacement for either. It exists for the drive full of decades they never met.
| Apple Photos + iCloud+ | All Our Years | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | The photos you take today. Every new shot backs up automatically, the moment you take it. | The drive you already have. Twenty-eight years of it, started long before iCloud existed. |
| Your 1.7 TB drive | iCloud Photos doesn't sync a drive in place. The archive has to be imported into your Photos library, then uploaded, so it ends up living twice: once on the drive, once in Photos. | Read exactly where it sits. No import, no second copy, no upload. |
| Getting started | Easy to turn on, then days of continuous uploading once a terabyte-scale archive is involved. | Point it at the drive. Browsing starts within minutes; the study keeps going overnight. |
| At archive scale | Twenty years of birthdays, holidays, and everyday life is a lot of moments, and Photos was never built to hold them all at once. Superb at camera-roll size, but libraries that reach the hundreds of thousands of items get heavy: slow to open, slow to scroll, slow to search, even on a new, fast Mac. | Built for exactly this scale. Your files stay plain folders on the drive; the app keeps a lightweight index beside them, so twenty years browses like twenty months. |
| Getting photos back out | The moments are yours; the files take work to reclaim. Photos is designed to be the one place everything lives, which works beautifully until you want your originals somewhere else. Out of a phone, tablet, or the library takes deliberate steps: download originals from iCloud first, then export, then wait. | There is no "out." Nothing was ever imported anywhere; the folders on your drive were the archive all along. |
| What 2 TB costs | $9.99/mo for the 2 TB tier your 1.7 TB needs: about $120 a year, roughly $600 over five years, $1,200 over ten. Monthly billing only, no annual discount. | $59 once for the first 500 families, $99 after. (Family 5-Mac pack: $79.) Never a subscription. |
| If you stop paying | Photos already synced stay put, but backups and syncing stop, and new photos wait on the device until you pay again or free up room. | Nothing to stop. The one-time purchase doesn't meter your archive; the only subscription anywhere is an optional future add-on for remote family sharing. |
| Privacy | Genuinely strong: on-device intelligence, plus optional end-to-end encryption with Advanced Data Protection. Once synced, your originals live on Apple's servers. | Nothing to secure in transit, because nothing ever leaves your Mac. |
| What you get back | A searchable library, excellent face recognition, shared albums, editing tools, and prints, for the photos that make it in. | Events named in your own style, a timeline for every person, and moments that resurface on their own. |
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| Google Photos + Google One | All Our Years | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | The photos you take today, backed up automatically from every device you own. | The drive you already have. Decades that predate the phone in your pocket. |
| Your 1.7 TB drive | Uploaded through Google's desktop app or the web: days to weeks on a typical home connection. Original quality keeps it intact, but counts fully against your quota. | Read in place. No upload queue, no quota to fill. |
| Getting started | Install the uploader, choose Original quality, and wait out the upload. | Point it at the drive. Browsing starts within minutes; the study runs overnight. |
| What 2 TB costs | $99.99/yr for the 2 TB tier your 1.7 TB needs (about $100 a year): roughly $500 over five years, $1,000 over ten. | $59 once for the first 500 families, $99 after. (Family 5-Mac pack: $79.) Never a subscription. |
| If you stop paying | You can't back up new photos once you're over quota, and content that stays over quota for two years becomes eligible for deletion, after Google gives notice. | Nothing to stop, and nothing is ever at risk of deletion for non-payment, because nothing was ever uploaded. |
| Privacy | Encrypted in transit and at rest, though not end-to-end. Google's systems analyze your photos to power search and features, and your originals live in Google's data centers. | Nothing to analyze remotely, because nothing ever leaves your Mac. |
| What you get back | The best photo search in the business, effortless sharing links, and automatic backup on every platform, for the photos that make it in. | Events named in your own style, a timeline for every person, and moments that resurface on their own. |
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An honest comparison has to run both ways. Here's what Apple and Google genuinely do better.
Automatic backup of every new photo, with a real offsite copy the moment it's taken, is genuine disaster protection. All Our Years doesn't do this. It's built for photos already sitting on a drive, and it means it when it says: keep a 3-2-1 backup. Getting a full camera roll onto a drive first? There's a step-by-step guide.
Apple and Google put your library on every device you own, with real sharing links to anyone, anywhere. All Our Years is a Mac app: the household companion view only works over your own Wi-Fi, is view-only, and has no public share links.
A decade of full editing suites, print products, and refinement that All Our Years doesn't attempt. It doesn't edit a single photo, on purpose: it only helps you find and relive the ones you already have.
Keep Apple or Google for the photos you take today. Point All Our Years at the drive in the closet. They're complements, not competitors: a one-time purchase versus a storage bill that scales with your past.
Reading a photo archive in place, with local, private AI, isn't unique to All Our Years. The five tools below are its closest relatives, and each one is genuinely good at its job. The comparison matters because what separates them from All Our Years is purpose, not polish.
| Tool | Price | What it's genuinely good at | How All Our Years differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excire Foto 2027 (Mac + Windows) | $249 one-time | Photographer-grade AI search over folders in place, all local: free-text search, automatic keywording, people search, duplicate finding, even reading text inside photos (signs, race bibs). | Built for finding and culling; it answers "show me X." All Our Years answers "what happened to us": named events in your voice, person arcs, resurfacing moments. |
| Peakto (Mac) | $270 lifetime, or $10/mo | A meta-catalog for creators: indexes folders, drives, NAS, Lightroom, Capture One, and Apple Photos libraries in one place, local AI, natural-language search, faces. | Built to unify a professional's scattered catalogs. All Our Years assumes no catalogs at all, just the family drive, and turns it into a story rather than a search surface. |
| Mylio Photos (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android) | Free app; Photos+ for device sync and backup runs $240/yr ($20/mo) | Local-first library with linked folders, face recognition, calendar browsing, and a clever peer-to-peer sync across your devices with no cloud. | The archive-reading is in service of sync and protection across devices. All Our Years doesn't sync anything anywhere; it spends everything on understanding: naming your events, building person timelines, resurfacing the past. |
| Tonfotos (Mac, Windows, Linux) | Free tier; Personal $39 once, Family $99 once | A family-focused archive viewer with strong face recognition (it can follow a person across ages) that works over your existing folders. Closest in spirit and price. | Its organizing raw material is dates and faces. All Our Years also reads your own folder names as ground truth, learns your naming voice, infers occasions from the scene itself, and does it all under a hard read-only guarantee with a study-then-reveal arc. |
| digiKam (Mac, Windows, Linux) | Free, open source | A serious, decades-mature digital asset manager: in-place folders, face detection and recognition, deep metadata, batch tools, immense configurability. | A power tool with a power tool's learning curve, built for management. All Our Years is built for the reveal: point it at the drive tonight, meet your family's story tomorrow. |
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So is "none of them do this" fair? Reading an archive in place isn't unique, and this page just said so. What we haven't found anywhere else is what comes after the reading: software that learns how your own family named its years and names the rest the same way, tells each person's story from first photo to latest, and brings moments back before you ask.
Importers reorganize your files. Uploaders send them away. All Our Years opens your drive read-only and never writes a byte to it, so the #1 fear of pointing software at twenty irreplaceable years simply doesn't apply.
No sidecar files, no hidden database on the drive. Delete All Our Years and your archive is provably untouched.
The library opens as soon as the first photos are indexed and visibly deepens while the study runs.
Unplug it. You keep browsing everything from your Mac; full resolution returns when it's plugged back in.
Every tool on the market answers "show me dogs" and "show me beaches." None of them answer what happened to us? All Our Years rebuilds the events of your life, and names them by learning from the folders you named yourself, back when you still had time.
"2019-04 Easter at Grandma's": proposed automatically, in the same style as the 600 folders you once named by hand.
Birthday cake plus December isn't a birthday. All Our Years reads the scene (even the banner text) before it labels the day — then lines up every year a tradition recurred, birthdays and anniversaries included, so you can see the whole run at once.
"This week in 2011." "Ten years since this trip." The archive comes to you instead of waiting to be searched.
A family archive is the opposite: the same few people, across twenty years of growing up. A newborn's face and a teenager's face never match directly, so All Our Years follows each person through time, window by window, and keeps the thread.
Hospital blanket to high school in one continuous scroll, assembled from every photo they ever appeared in.
Meet the family strip after the study, type each name once, and every view in the app understands "who."
The dog gets a timeline. And when two orange cats fifteen years apart can't honestly be told apart, it says so.
Apple silicon's Neural Engine studies hundreds of thousands of photos overnight, on your desk. That's why the privacy story and the performance story are the same story: nothing gets faster by leaving your Mac, so nothing ever does.
Built on a real 314,391-file, 1.7 TB archive. No upload bar, no queue: the study runs while you sleep.
It benchmarks your actual drive before promising anything, and the estimate tightens as it works.
The study yields to whatever you're doing and pauses itself under memory pressure. Your Mac stays yours.
Dates and GPS read from inside MOV/MP4 files: the first-steps clip lands beside the photos of it.
92% of photos carry hidden dates; the rest are placed by folder, history, and surrounding events.
Your library presents clean while the drive keeps every copy. Nothing is deleted behind your back.
"Cake," "beach," "the blue house": search understands the scene, not just the filename, entirely on your Mac.
Hide anything behind its own password, right from the lightbox. Nothing deleted, just out of sight until you unlock it.
The study checkpoints constantly. A yanked cable costs seconds, not hours.
One QR code and anyone on your Wi-Fi browses: phone, iPad, grandma's laptop. View-only, no accounts.
Pairs to your Mac in one scan, shows study progress, and pings you when the reveal is ready.
Any event, person, or year on the TV in one click. Family movie night, zero prep.
After every pass, the study proves its own bookkeeping before it says "done."
End-to-end-encrypted sharing for out-of-town family: the only subscription, and honest about why.
All Our Years just reads it back to you.
Download for MacFree version to try · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon