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Most actions in Iris are done at the item level — for one or more selected photos or videos. This page is the reference for every per‑item action: where it lives, what it does, and what keyboard shortcut it has.

You can perform these actions from:

Mark items you want to find later quickly.

Favorited items appear in the Favorites node in the sidebar. The same shortcut toggles favorite off again.

If you point Iris at an Apple Photos library, Iris will carry-over your favorites during the initial import.

Open one item full‑size.

Useful for scanned photos or any item where the file has no real (or an estimated) capture date.

A small sheet appears letting you enter a date (and optional precision — year only, month, or full date). The item moves into the Approximate Dates sidebar node and starts appearing under date hierarchies based on the date you set.

Approximate Dates are particularly helpful for old, scanned photos where the exact date is unknown. For example: a black and white photo of your grandparents at the beach might be set to "June, 1950s" or a photo of holiday party might be "December, 1987".

Reveal the file on disk in a Finder window.

Send items to any macOS share extension — Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Files, third‑party share extensions, etc.

Iris will attempt to share the original item if it exists on disk. Otherwise, it will fallback to sharing the thumbnail image.

Iris generates a stable iris:// URL for every item. Copying it puts the URL on your clipboard so you can paste it into a note, a chat, or anywhere else — and clicking the URL later jumps straight to that item in Iris.

The URL contains only an internal identifier; it doesn't expose the file path or the photo itself.

If Iris has detected text in the image (via OCR), copy it directly to the clipboard.

This is the fastest way to grab a phone number off a business card photo, an address off a sign, or a recipe off a piece of paper.

Next: The background pipeline →