ArchiveOptics
Ratings, flags & labels
One-key star ratings, pick/reject flags, and color labels — applied to one photo or a thousand at once, straight from the keyboard, exactly as you're used to.
PhotoLibrarian · Independent photo cataloguing for macOS
The editor is replaceable. Years of organization are not.
Star ratings. Pick flags. Color labels. Thousands of keywords. Collections built over a decade. That's what actually keeps photographers tied to a catalogue — not the editing tools. PhotoLibrarian imports all of it from Lightroom Classic in one step and gives your library a permanent, local, subscription-free home.
In development · Coming to the Mac App Store
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Migration
Move beyond the subscription without losing a single star.
Point PhotoLibrarian at your Lightroom Classic catalogue and it reads the catalogue file directly — read-only, never touching Lightroom's data — and carries your curation across: star ratings, pick and reject flags, color labels, hierarchical keywords, collections, GPS locations, capture dates, full camera EXIF, and your videos. Your image files stay exactly where they are; nothing is copied, converted, or re-organized unless you ask.
The importer has been verified against a real working catalogue of 150,893 photographs with over 100,000 keyword assignments — and that test ran on a minimally configured M1, not a maxed-out tower. Apple Photos users get the same treatment: albums, favorites, titles, and keywords import in place, including iCloud-only photos, with zero forced downloads.
Find
Ask your catalogue a precise question. In plain English.
The query builder composes real boolean searches — AND, OR, exclusions — as readable sentences, with no syntax to learn. Filter by date, rating, flag, color label, keyword (searching “Animals” automatically finds everything under it), camera, lens, file name, file type, exposure settings, focus quality, face quality, people, and more. Save any query and run it again with a double-click.
Organize
Curation tools that respect how photographers actually work.
Hierarchical keywords
Keyword trees of any depth, with autocomplete entry and bulk apply. Deleting or renaming a keyword never destroys data — keyword history is recoverable.
People, found on your Mac
On-device face recognition builds a private face index. Right-click any face, choose “Find This Person,” name them, and combine people with any other search.
Similar-photo stacks
Bursts and near-duplicates collapse into tidy stacks automatically. Rating a stack reaches every photo inside it, and stacks expand with one click.
Intelligent culling — advisory only
Focus and sharpness scoring, eyes-open detection, and face quality become searchable filters. The analysis advises; it never rates or rejects a photo for you.
RAW+JPEG & duplicates, handled
RAW+JPEG pairs display as one photograph. Duplicate copies across folders can be collapsed from view — nothing is ever deleted to “clean up.”
Edit
Practical editing, built in. Your originals, left alone.
Open any photo — including RAW — in a floating editor with live tone, color, three-way color grading, and calibration controls over a full 16-bit pipeline. Crop and straighten with aspect presets. Heal dust and blemishes with an on-device machine-learning brush. Denoise with an AI model you can judge honestly, in a 1:1 loupe, before committing.
Every edit is a non-destructive recipe. Saving writes a new file beside the untouched original and can catalogue it automatically — your archive only ever gains photographs.
Copy & export
Move photographs in the form you need. Never lose one on the way.
Copy any selection to a drive or NAS with a clean year/month/day folder structure rebuilt from capture dates — or flat, your choice. Produce resized JPEGs for sharing, 16-bit TIFFs, or true linear DNGs from your RAW files. Bundle a selection into a single zip, tested at terabyte scale. And it moves: in our timing runs, large photo copies complete faster than rsync transferring the same files. Every operation is copy-only: collisions get version names, duplicates are counted and skipped, and nothing existing is ever overwritten or deleted.
Safety
Built like archival software, because that's what it is.
One-click backup
“Back Up Now” captures your entire catalogue — organization, keywords, face index, editor recipes — in a single portable file. Restore fully or merge, on any Mac.
An honest operation log
Every import, copy, and export is logged durably, per file — including anything skipped and why — and exports as text for support.
Cloud-safe by design
Dropbox and iCloud placeholder files are never silently downloaded. Any operation that would pull data from the cloud asks first, with a disk-space check.
A
Your originals remain originals.
PhotoLibrarian never modifies, moves, or deletes an existing image file. Not during import, not during editing, not during any copy or export. That is not a setting — it is how the application is built.
Under the hood
Engineered for scale, built to stay private.
PhotoLibrarian has been tested past a million photographs — and it adapts to the Mac it's running on. On a powerful machine it widens its parallel processing lanes to use everything the hardware offers; on an older Mac with less memory it senses the smaller machine and draws back, staying smooth instead of swamping it. The same app is instant on a Mac Studio and instant on a base M1. Whether your archive is a few thousand photographs or a couple of million, this is built for you.
- Platform Native macOS, built exclusively for Apple Silicon (macOS 14.6 or later)
- Engine Rust core with an embedded DuckDB catalogue — and adaptive parallelism that scales to your hardware
- Formats RAW (NEF, CR2/CR3, ARW, RAF, DNG…), JPEG, HEIF/HEIC, TIFF, PSD, PNG, and video
- Scale Tested past a million photographs; copy speeds measured faster than rsync
- AI Face recognition, culling analysis, healing, and denoise — all on-device Core ML
- Privacy Zero network entitlements, zero telemetry, zero accounts
Working with scanned film?
Negative Converter turns your scanned negatives into finished positives — then PhotoLibrarian keeps them organized.