All Our Years reads the photo drive you already have, in place, and sorts it into events, people and places. Everything runs on your Mac.
| 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 | Not needed. Everything runs on your Mac and works offline. |
| Setup | Easy, then upload for days | Docker, configs, maintenance | Import and catalog | Point it at a drive. Browse within minutes while it keeps reading. |
| What it understands | Tags and faces | Tags and faces | Tags and faces | Events, people and places. Events are named in the style of your own folders. |
| How you browse | Grid + auto Memories | Grid | Grid | Timelines and moments: a timeline per person, "this week in 2009," slideshows. |
← swipe to see more →
These tools solve different problems. All Our Years is for the drive they leave behind.
Apple Photos and Google Photos are good at what they do, and most families should keep using one of them for the photos they take today. All Our Years is for the drive full of older photos that those services never saw.
| Apple Photos and Google Photos | All Our Years | |
|---|---|---|
| Where photos live | In the service's library, with originals stored in the cloud. | On your own drive. The app reads them where they are. |
| Upload required | Yes. A large archive has to be imported and uploaded first, which can take days. | No. Point it at the drive and browse within minutes. |
| Cost model | Free storage up to a limit, then a recurring storage plan that grows with the size of your library. | Free tier with no time limit. $59 once for the full version ($79 for 5 Macs). Family Circle sharing is an optional $49 a year. Mac App Store: $59.99 once. |
| Organizes an existing folder archive | Sorts by date, people and places once the photos are in the library. | Builds events from your own folder names, plus people and places, without moving a file. |
| Works offline | Mostly needs a connection to sync and search across the full library. | Yes. Everything runs on your Mac. Unplug the drive and you still browse the index. |
← swipe to see more →
For some jobs they are the right tool, and All Our Years does not try to replace them.
Automatic backup of every new photo gives you an offsite copy the moment it is taken. All Our Years is built for photos already on a drive, so keep a 3-2-1 backup. To get a full camera roll onto a drive first, see the step-by-step guide.
Apple and Google put your library on every device you own and offer public sharing links. All Our Years is a Mac app. The household view works over your own Wi-Fi and is view-only. Family Circle is the optional way to share with relatives elsewhere.
Both services have mature editing tools and print products. All Our Years does not edit photos. It helps you find and revisit the ones you have.
Keep Apple or Google for the photos you take today and use All Our Years for the drive in the closet. The two work side by side.
Reading a photo archive in place with on-device AI is not unique to All Our Years. These five apps are the closest relatives, and each is good at its job. They differ mainly in purpose.
| Tool | Pricing | What it does well | How All Our Years differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excire Foto 2027 (Mac + Windows) | One-time purchase | 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) | Lifetime license or monthly subscription | 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; paid yearly plan for device sync and backup | 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; paid one-time licenses | 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. | 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. |
← swipe to see more →
What All Our Years adds after reading the drive: it learns how your family named its folders and names the remaining events the same way, builds a timeline for each person, and brings back moments like "this week in 2011."
For pricing and platform notes on each app, see the full roundup on the blog.
All Our Years opens your drive read-only and never writes to it. It does not import, move or upload your files.
No sidecar files, no hidden database on the drive. Delete All Our Years and your archive is exactly as it was.
The library opens as soon as the first photos are indexed and fills in while the app keeps reading.
Unplug it and you can still browse from your Mac. Full resolution returns when the drive is plugged back in.
All Our Years rebuilds the events in your archive and names them by learning from the folders you named yourself.
"2019-04 Easter at Grandma's" is proposed automatically, in the same style as the folders you named by hand.
The app reads the scene, including banner text, before it labels a day. It then lines up every year a tradition recurred, such as birthdays and anniversaries.
"This week in 2011" and "Ten years since this trip" bring older photos back without a search.
A family archive has the same few people across 28 years of growing up. A newborn's face and a teenager's face do not match directly, so All Our Years follows each person through time, window by window.
Baby photos to high school in one continuous scroll, assembled from every photo they appear in.
Type each name once on the family strip and every view in the app uses it.
The dog gets a timeline too. When two similar cats fifteen years apart cannot be told apart, the app says so.
Apple silicon's Neural Engine reads hundreds of thousands of photos overnight on your desk. Photos, names and faces are never uploaded.
Built on a real family drive of 314,391 photos and videos from 1998 to 2026, 1.7 TB on a 6 TB external drive. The first full read took one night over USB.
It benchmarks your drive first, and the estimate tightens as it works.
The app yields to whatever you are doing and pauses itself under memory pressure.
All Our Years curates small albums straight from your archive and puts them on an Apple Watch face. Every photo is previewed in a real watch crop before it goes anywhere, so the clock does not cover a face.
Suggested albums built from what the app already knows: the whole family, a kid growing up, this year's best, recurring occasions, pets, scenery. Review, reorder, or swap every pick.
One click keeps an Apple Photos album in sync; hook it up once in the iPhone's Watch app and your watch face follows it from then on. This option uses your own iCloud Photos, which must be on for the Mac and iPhone.
Send a standalone watch face file to family; they tap "Add to Apple Watch" and need no app. This is a beta: Apple has not published this format, and a watchOS update could stop accepting these files.
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 shows each photo once while the drive keeps every copy. Nothing is deleted.
Search for "cake," "beach" or "the blue house." It matches the scene, not just the filename, on your Mac.
Hide anything behind its own password, right from the lightbox. Nothing is deleted; it stays hidden until you unlock it.
Progress is saved constantly. A pulled cable costs seconds, not hours.
One QR code lets anyone on your Wi-Fi browse from a phone, iPad or laptop. View-only, no accounts.
Pairs to your Mac in one scan, shows progress, and notifies you when the first read is done.
Play any event, person or year on the TV in one click.
After every pass, the app verifies its own counts before it reports "done."
Curated sets from the archive, delivered as an auto-syncing Photos album or a shareable watch face file (beta).
The world map is bundled in the app and works offline. Street-level detail is an optional online layer.
Rescan any time: added, removed, and moved files are detected, and nothing disappears without your review.
A living web of who shows up with whom, drawn from the photos themselves, growing year by year in the Fun Box.
End-to-end encrypted sharing with relatives, $49 a year. It is the only subscription and entirely optional.
Free to try. $59 once to unlock everything ($59.99 on the Mac App Store).
Download for MacFree version has no time limit · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon