Native macOS software for photographers
ArchiveOptics builds serious, local-first Mac software for people with real photographic archives — decades of family history, years of professional work, boxes of film. Your images stay on your Mac, in your folders, untouched. Our software organizes, preserves, and restores them, and never holds them hostage.
Our software
macOS · Coming to the Mac App Store
A permanent, independent home for your photo library. PhotoLibrarian imports your entire Lightroom Classic catalogue in one step — star ratings, flags, color labels, keywords, and collections included — and gives you fast, precise search across archives tested past a million photographs, without a subscription and without moving a single file.
macOS · Coming to the Mac App Store
A digital darkroom for scanned film. Negative Converter turns camera-scanned black-and-white and color negatives into finished positives with a conversion engine modeled on how film prints actually work — then lets you refine, repair, and export 16-bit archival masters, while the original scan is never rewritten.
Our approach
Most photo software wants to become the center of your life: your files in its library, your edits in its proprietary catalogue, your archive behind its subscription. We think that's backwards. A photographic archive should belong to the photographer — organized in ordinary folders, readable by any tool, intact long after any one application is gone.
Everything runs on your Mac. Your photographs are never uploaded, analyzed remotely, or synced anywhere you didn't put them. PhotoLibrarian ships with zero network entitlements — it is technically incapable of phoning home.
Neither application ever modifies or deletes an existing image file. Every edit is stored as data alongside the untouched original; every copy operation creates new files and refuses to overwrite anything.
Face recognition, focus analysis, healing, and denoising all run on-device with bundled machine-learning models. You get modern AI capability with the privacy of a machine that never asks the internet for help.
ArchiveOptics