Introducing Iris, version one.
Photos used to live on your Mac.
With Iris, they still do.
Iris is a native Mac app that turns the photos you already have — in folders, on drives, in Apple Photos — into a fast, searchable library. People, places, moments, even the words in your pictures and the speech in your videos. Nothing is moved, renamed, or uploaded. Ever.
Free for 14 days · No account, no credit card · $29 once, no subscription
macOS 15 Sequoia or 26 Tahoe · Runs happily beside Apple Photos
Kind words, so far
“I have been testing Iris for a couple of months and I think it is delightful… Iris is great, old-school, indie Mac software.” Nick Heer · Pixel Envy
“For the first time I have this entire digital photos history viewable in one place. It’s marvelous and transformative.” Alan S. · Pretty Good Hat
“Iris goes beyond simply showing you pictures in a neat grid...The result is a very human take on a photo viewer.” Craig Grannell · Stuff
Nothing moves. Nothing changes.
Iris scans the folders or Apple Photos library you already have — read‑only — and builds a fast, intelligent library of its own on your Mac. Your originals, and the Photos library you've curated, are left exactly where you put them — completely unchanged. No cloud. No accounts. Your memories are safely yours.
How it works
Up and running in minutes.
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1
Point Iris at your photos
Choose any folders, external drives, or your Apple Photos library. Nothing is imported, copied, or moved.
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2
Iris builds its own library
Faces, places, dates, text in photos, speech in videos — all indexed on your Mac, by your Mac. Read‑only, always.
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3
Explore a lifetime of memories
Browse by people, places, and moments — while your originals stay exactly where they've always been.
Faces
Find your people.
Iris recognizes the people in your photos using on-device machine learning — no faces ever leave your Mac. Browse by age, search by name, and watch your kids grow up.
Geography
Find your places.
Plot every photo on a map and rediscover where you've been. Jump to nearby photos, bookmark your favorite locations, and use Photo Trails to retrace your steps, favorite hikes, and road trips.
Time
Find your moments.
Modern cameras give you exact dates. A scanned photo of your family from the 1980s doesn't. Iris lets you assign an approximate month, year, or decade when you don't know exactly when — so the whole family album fits inside one timeline.
Sounds like your library?
Free for 14 days · No account, no credit card · Nothing uploaded, ever
Find
More than a search box.
Search, sort, and filter by any criteria. Iris extracts text from your photos, transcribes speech in your videos, and makes it all available with a fast, powerful UI that uncovers the needles in your haystack.
On every screen
Your library, in the living room.
Pair the Mac app with Iris for Apple TV and your whole library shows up on the biggest screen in the house — right over your home Wi-Fi. Curl up on the couch, put a slideshow on the big TV, or hand the remote to a grandparent. Your Mac stays the source of truth. No cloud account, no re-uploading, no extra subscription.
Apple TV app available now · iPhone & iPad apps are in App Store review — join the newsletter to hear the moment they land.
Privacy
Read-only. On-device. Yours.
Iris reads from the folders, external drives, or Apple Photos library you already use — always read‑only. It never edits, moves, or renames your originals, and it never writes a single change back to your Photos library: your albums, edits, favorites, keywords, and People stay exactly as they are. Run Iris and Photos side by side — Photos won't even know Iris is there.
And every bit of intelligence — faces, locations, text, speech — is computed on your Mac and stays on your Mac. There are no accounts and no cloud servers. 100% private by design. Read the privacy policy →
And one more thing… or seventeen.
Little details, big delight.
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Insights
Your photography, by the numbers — how many photos you take, when you take them, the cameras you use, and the people and places that show up most.
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List view
Your library as a spreadsheet — a fast, sortable table with configurable columns: date, camera, lens, file size, dimensions, and dozens more.
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Windows & tabs
Open as many windows and tabs as you like. Iris works the way Mac apps are meant to.
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An MCP server, built in
Iris ships with an MCP server so Claude and other LLMs can search your library on your terms — locally, with your permission.
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Ages, on the day
See how old everyone was the day a photo was taken — no math required. Watch the years pass, face by face.
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Surprise Me!
Put your whole library on shuffle and rediscover the photos you'd forgotten you took. A small joy, every time.
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Slideshows over FaceTime
Share a slideshow with family on a FaceTime call. Gather everyone around the photos — even when they're far away.
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Birthdays, every year
On every birthday, Iris surfaces photos of the people you love from years past. The same day, across a lifetime.
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Copy text from photos
Iris reads the words in your photos — menus, signs, receipts, handwriting — so you can select and copy them like any other text.
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Photos taken nearby
From any photo, jump straight to others taken in the same place — even years apart. Rediscover your favorite spots.
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Same day, different years
Pivot from any photo to everything else you shot that day — or that day across every year you've owned a camera.
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Photos taken by someone
Assign a camera to a person and see every photo they've ever taken. Finally, the photographer gets credit.
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Browse by camera
See every photo from your old film SLR, your first iPhone, or your kid's GoPro. Each camera tells its own story.
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Quick switcher — ⌘K
Hit ⌘K to jump anywhere in Iris — albums, people, places — without ever reaching for the mouse.
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Videos, transcribed
Iris transcribes the speech in your videos so a half-remembered phrase from a birthday toast is just a search away.
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URL friendly
Every photo, album, person, and place has its own link. Paste an Iris URL into another app — one click takes you right back to it.
From real libraries
People seem to like it.
This is literally the app I've dreamt of for a very long time — a photo browser that can handle multiple sources with a UI as polished as Apple Photos. I already love every pixel of it.
Installed it on a trial basis, fell in love with it right away, and bought it immediately.
As a former Aperture Apple software engineer, I'm impressed.
This sort of software fit, finish, care and love is the whole reason I’m an Apple and Mac user all these decades.
This UX detail from Iris when creating a person is lovely (raise your hand if you’ve ever cried when a carousel unexpectedly showed you a photo of a late friend). I love when humans make software for humans 🧡
I am so happy to finally find a beautiful and fast consumer-grade photo library that doesn’t insist on reorganizing my files or rely on the cloud. This is something I have sorely missed since I moved away from Lightroom years ago.
Before you ask
Questions people ask.
What happens when my free trial ends?
The trial is the full app, free for 14 days — the clock starts the first time you launch it. When it ends, Iris stops opening your library until you buy a license. Everything it built — the faces you named, the search index, the transcripts — stays safe on your disk, so buying later picks up exactly where you left off. And your photos themselves? They were never touched either way.
My photos live in iCloud. Does Iris work for me?
Yes. Iris works best when your originals are downloaded to your Mac — in Apple Photos, that's Settings → Download Originals to this Mac. If your library is optimized instead, Iris falls back to the best thumbnail Photos has on hand, so everything still shows up in your library — full resolution and the best machine-learning results prefer the originals.
Will Iris change or reorganize my Apple Photos library?
No. Iris opens your Photos library read-only and builds a separate library of its own. Your albums, edits, favorites, keywords, and People stay exactly as they are — Iris never writes a single change back. Keep using Photos.app at the same time; it won't even know Iris is there.
How big a library can Iris handle?
Big. Iris was built for lifetime-sized libraries, and people run it happily on collections well past 100,000 photos. Processing happens in stages: thumbnails and dates show up within minutes, while face recognition and video transcription keep working in the background — a few hours for large libraries, longer for enormous ones. You can browse the whole time.
Will version 2 cost me again?
Your $29 covers every Iris 1.x update — bug fixes and new features alike. If a paid version 2 ships someday, existing customers who bought direct will get an upgrade discount, and your copy of v1 keeps working regardless. (Apple doesn't support upgrade discounts on the App Store.)
Is Iris Mac-only?
The library lives in the Mac app — that's the heart of Iris. A free-standing Apple TV companion streams your library to the living room today, and iPhone & iPad apps are finished and awaiting App Store review. There's no Windows version.
Try Iris free for 14 days.
No accounts, no servers, no sign-ups, no nonsense.
14-day free trial · One-time purchase for all v1 updates.
Requires macOS Sequoia 15.0 or Tahoe 26.0
Made with care, on a Mac, in Virginia.
Not ready today? That's fine.
Your photos aren't going anywhere — and neither is Iris. A few times a year, I send a letter when there's genuinely something to say: a new release, a look at what I'm building, or tips for getting more out of Iris. No spam. Promise.