Getting started

What Iris is for

Iris is a photo and video library manager for the Mac. It's not a photo editor, not a sync service, and not a cloud. It exists to make a folder full of photos — or a hundred folders, on a dozen drives — feel like one coherent library you can actually browse.

The core idea: Iris reads your files where they already are. It builds a database of metadata next to your library, but it never moves, copies, or changes the photos themselves. If you turn Iris off tomorrow, your folder structure looks exactly the same as it did before you installed it.

System requirements

macOS 15.7 or later
Apple silicon or Intel Mac (Apple silicon strongly recommended — face recognition and content tagging use the Neural Engine when available)
Free disk space for thumbnails and the database (typically ~5–10% of the size of your library)

First launch

When you open Iris for the first time, you'll see the Welcome window.

The Welcome window explains, in short:

Iris needs to know where your photos live.
That can be a folder on your Mac, an external drive, or your Apple Photos library.
Iris will never move, copy, or modify your photos.
All processing happens locally on your Mac.

You have two buttons:

Add Folder… — pick any folder on your disk. Iris will scan it (and every subfolder) recursively.
Add Photos Library… — pick an Apple Photos library (a .photoslibrary package, usually in ~/Pictures/).

Either one closes the Welcome window and starts processing. You're now in the main Iris window.

Tip: You can always add more sources later — see Adding sources.

What happens after you add a source

Iris immediately starts the background pipeline:

It walks the folder tree to find every photo and video file.
It reads embedded metadata (date, GPS, camera, EXIF) from each file.
It generates thumbnails of each item.
It hashes each file for duplicate detection.
It runs local ML models for face detection, content tagging, and OCR.
If enabled, it transcribes the audio of any video files.
It indexes every metadata field for full‑text search.

You can use Iris while this is happening.

To watch progress, choose Window → Status (⌘⇧1). See The background pipeline for the full breakdown.

Trial and licensing

If you're using the direct (non‑Mac App Store) build:

Iris launches in trial mode the first time you run it. You get the full feature set for a limited time.
When the trial expires, the welcome window will direct you to purchase a license.
Once licensed, Iris runs without restriction. See Licensing and privacy.

If you bought Iris through the Mac App Store, licensing is handled by Apple and there's no trial step.