Settings

Open Iris → Settings (⌘,) to configure Iris. The Settings window is organized into panes across the top.

General

Setting	Description
Layout	Choose between Classic (fixed‑size grid) and Modern (an experimental fluid layout that preserves you items' aspect ratios).
Color Scheme	Follow System, Always Light, or Always Dark.
Show Decades in Sidebar	When on, the Exact Dates hierarchy starts at a decade level (e.g., "2010s") before drilling into years. When off, it goes straight to years.
Guess Date from Filename	When on, Iris will try to parse a capture date out of a filename when the file itself has no date metadata (e.g., `IMG_20180524_153012.jpg`).
Birthdays Must Include Person	When on, the Birthday sub‑node of a person only shows photos that actually contain that person's face — not just any photo from that calendar date.

Library

These settings control which background pipeline stages run.

Setting	Description
Enable Face Recognition	Detect faces in photos and group them into people. Turning off skips face detection entirely; existing data remains.
Detect Text in Images	Run on‑device OCR to extract text from photos. Required for `⌘⇧C` (Copy Text From Image) and for OCR text in search.
Tag Items	Run on‑device content tagging. Populates the Magic tab's content tags and makes them searchable.
Transcribe Videos	Run on‑device speech‑to‑text on the audio track of video files. The first time you enable this, Iris downloads a ~460 MB model. Makes video transcripts searchable.

Turning a stage off keeps existing data but skips the work for new items. Turning a stage back on causes Iris to catch up on previously‑skipped items in the background.

Server

Controls the local HTTP server that powers the companion apps.

Setting	Description
Enable API Server	Starts a local HTTP server on port 8490. Required by the iOS and Apple TV companion apps.
Enable Website	Adds a web browser UI at `http://<mac>.local:8490`. Requires the API server.
Enable MCP Server	Adds a read-only Model Context Protocol endpoint for AI tools. Requires the API server.

See Companion apps and the local server for the full story.

Privacy

Setting	Description
Enable Crash Reporting	When on, Iris sends anonymous crash reports if the app crashes (no photo data, no metadata).
Enable Telemetry	When on, Iris sends anonymous, aggregated usage statistics (no photo data, no metadata).

Both are on‑by‑default to help us improve Iris for yourself and other users, but you can disable them if you'd rather not send anything outside your Mac.

Special

A pane for experimental and advanced settings — what's here changes from release to release.