PhotoLibrarian · Photo organizer and digital asset management for Mac
Catalog your Mac in one pass with Scan Everything, the Apple Photos libraries and Lightroom catalogs you check on the drives you choose, then every other photo and video on those drives. One real run brought in about 198,000 records with no further clicks.
Read Lightroom catalogs (ratings, keywords, collections, and smart collections) and reuse Lightroom's own previews. Catalog Apple Photos in place, iCloud-only photos included, with nothing downloaded. If an original lives only in your iCloud or Dropbox, PhotoLibrarian asks first, and macOS downloads it from your own account.
Find a person by their face, then name them to search by name. Let Intelligent Culling score focus, face quality, and open eyes. It never changes your ratings. Fold bursts into similar-photo stacks. Include or exclude machine keywords by source. Build queries that read like sentences, and save them. Find the film negatives in your library and hand any one to Negative Converter.
All of it on your Mac. Designed by photographers, for photographers.
What it does
Bring in everything
Star ratings, flags, color labels, thousands of keywords, collections built over a decade, that's the work worth protecting, wherever it lives today.
Start with Scan Everything. One command finds every Apple Photos library and Lightroom catalog on the drives you choose and imports the ones you check. Then it catalogs every other photo and video on those drives, skipping anything already cataloged. In one real run, it brought in about 198,000 records with no further clicks. Or catalog a single drive or NAS folder in place, or copy a memory card to a permanent home.
Import a Lightroom catalog and its ratings, flags, color labels, keywords, collections, and videos come across. Smart collections become saved queries wherever their rules translate. The first real test brought in 150,075 photos and 104,178 keyword assignments, matching an independent count exactly. In a later run on a 157,000-photo catalog, Lightroom's own previews were reused, 154,729 of them, with zero failures, so the library was browsable in minutes.
Catalog an Apple Photos library in place: 45,076 records in a real run, 45,075 of them iCloud-only, and nothing downloaded. Albums become keywords and collections; favorites become pick flags. If an original lives only in your iCloud or Dropbox, PhotoLibrarian asks first, and macOS downloads it from your own account.
Your files stay exactly where they are. Nothing is moved, converted, or reorganized unless you ask.
It organizes itself
After an import, PhotoLibrarian analyzes every photo on your Mac and writes its own keywords for scenes, subjects, dogs and cats. They're kept apart from yours, so any search can include or exclude them by source.
Face search runs on your Mac too. Right-click a face and choose Find This Person, in the current view or across every photo. Name a face once and the name becomes a keyword that works everywhere, with Narrow, Medium, or Wide matching.
Intelligent Culling scores focus, face quality, open eyes, and blink risk, and counts the people in each frame, all searchable. Bursts and near-identical shots collapse into similar-photo stacks; rate or keyword a stack and every hidden member gets it.
It even finds the film negatives in your library, scans that were never converted, working from cached previews, with nothing downloaded. Right-click one to send it straight to Negative Converter.
Through all of it, the analysis is advisory only: it never sets a rating, flag, or color label. It suggests. You decide.
Find anything
Describe what you're looking for. Type “a black dog” or “snow on trees” into Description Search above the gallery, and PhotoLibrarian finds those photos by what's in them, best match first, no keywords needed. Right-click any photo and choose Find Photos Like This One to see the others that look like it. The image model and the search index stay on your Mac.
The query builder writes real searches as readable sentences, no syntax to learn. Filter by date, rating, flag, color label, keyword, file name, camera, lens, exposure, focus quality, face quality, people, and more. Ask for the keyword “Animals” and it finds everything filed beneath it.
Join conditions with AND BOTH, EITHER, or ONLY ONE, one or the other, but not both. Ask for photos from the last three months, and the saved query stays correct on any future day. Save the queries you use; each one is a double-click away.
Video is first-class too. Clips play right in the app, and a query can ask for codec, duration, frame rate, dynamic range (SDR, HLG, HDR10, Dolby Vision), audio, or Live Photo.
Copy your way
Consolidate a scattered collection into one destination, in year/month/day folders built from capture dates, or flat, your choice. De-duplicate on the way, or keep every duplicate deliberately, also your choice. Send it to a drive, a NAS, or a single zip file stress-tested at a terabyte. In our timing runs, large copies finished faster than rsync moving the same files.
Copy Resized makes sharing copies on the way out: 1,000- or 2,000-pixel JPEGs, or any size you set, as JPEG or lossless TIFF. When every selected photo is RAW, it also offers a full-resolution, 16-bit linear DNG. One checkbox strips all metadata but the color profile; another removes just the GPS location.
Every copy is copy-only: a name collision gets a new name, and nothing existing is ever overwritten or deleted.
Edit in a pinch
PhotoLibrarian is a photo-management utility with a capable editor included. It isn't trying to replace a dedicated editor, it's there so that most days, you never have to leave.
Work in tone, tone curve, color with a white-balance eyedropper, black and white, texture, clarity, dehaze, three-way grading, and calibration, over a full 16-bit pipeline, including RAW. The heal tool borrows nearby real texture first and turns to an on-device fill model only when it must. Judge AI denoise in a 1:1 sample, with a chroma-only option that keeps grain. Masks adjust part of a photo, sky, subject, people, or a brushed area. Crop and straighten with aspect presets.
Every edit is a non-destructive recipe. Save writes a new JPEG, 16-bit TIFF, or linear DNG, PhotoLibrarian refuses to save over the photo you're editing. The heal's fill model and AI denoise need macOS 15; on macOS 14, the heal tool copies nearby texture only, and denoise is not available.
Protection
One click backs up your entire catalog (keywords, collections, named faces, stacks, saved queries, and settings) in a single file, with or without thumbnails. Restore it whole, or merge it into the catalog you have now. Your photo files themselves are not included.
Sync Changed Folders finds new and vanished files in the folders it watches. It asks first before adding a thousand or more, and removes records only after a confirmation that names the missing files.
Missing folders stay in view, blue when disconnected, red when moved, gray when they need access. Choose New Location… and the catalog follows a moved folder, with no rescan. Grant Access… restores access.
Imports, scans, copies, and backups keep an exportable log, including what was skipped and why. An unplugged drive can never read as a mass deletion. Remove from Catalog never deletes, moves, or renames a file.
If an original lives only in your iCloud or Dropbox, PhotoLibrarian asks first, and macOS downloads it from your own account. Batch prompts show the size and default to Skip.
No network access, macOS itself blocks it from connecting to the internet. Every machine-learning model runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is shared, no account, no analytics.
We believe your data should stay your data, on your own machines, yours to work with any way you want, in any software you want. So PhotoLibrarian never moves or deletes your photographs, and never changes an original on its own. Edits are saved as new files, the editor refuses to save over the photo it is editing, and copies never replace anything. That is how the application is built.
Under the hood
PhotoLibrarian has been tested past a million photographs. It is built for Apple silicon and puts all of it to work: the Neural Engine, the GPU and every CPU core. It adapts to the Mac it runs on. On a powerful Mac it runs more work side by side; on a smaller one with less memory, it draws back and stays smooth. Photos appear the moment the app opens, even in a catalog of more than 400,000 photos and videos.
Questions
A photo organizer for the Mac: digital asset management for your photographs and videos. It catalogs the photos on your drives, NAS, Apple Photos libraries, and Lightroom catalogs where they already are. Then it finds anything with queries that read like sentences, recognizes faces and writes its own keywords on your Mac, copies and de-duplicates, and backs up the whole catalog.
No. It catalogs your files where they are; nothing is moved, converted, or reorganized unless you ask. Edits are saved as new files, the editor refuses to save over the photo it is editing, and copies never replace anything. Remove from Catalog never deletes, moves, or renames a file.
Yes. It catalogs whole drives and NAS folders in place. A disconnected drive's folders stay in view, and an unplugged drive can never read as a mass deletion. Moved a folder? Point the catalog at its new home, with no rescan.
No. PhotoLibrarian opens the catalog strictly read-only and never writes to it. Ratings, flags, color labels, keywords, and collections come across, smart collections become saved queries wherever their rules translate, and Lightroom's own previews are reused. Lightroom keeps working exactly as before.
Yes. Duplicate copies across drives fold to one, and bursts and near-identical shots collapse into similar-photo stacks. When you copy a collection to one place, de-duplicate on the way, or keep every duplicate. Your call.
Yes. Type a description such as “a black dog” or “snow on trees,” and PhotoLibrarian finds the photos that show it, best match first. It looks at the pictures themselves, not at keywords or file names. Right-click any photo and choose Find Photos Like This One to find others that look like it. The image model and the search index stay on your Mac.
No. Face recognition runs on your Mac, on its Neural Engine. PhotoLibrarian has no network access, macOS itself blocks it from connecting to the internet, so nothing is uploaded or shared. If an original lives only in your iCloud or Dropbox, PhotoLibrarian asks first, and macOS downloads it from your own account.
It has been tested past a million photographs. Photos appear the moment the app opens, even in a catalog of more than 400,000 photos and videos.
A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14.6 or later. The heal's fill model and AI denoise need macOS 15.
PhotoLibrarian is coming to the Mac App Store as a one-time purchase, with no subscription. To hear the day it ships, email info@archiveoptics.com.
Negative Converter turns your negatives into finished photographs. PhotoLibrarian finds the film negatives already in your library and sends any one of them over with a right-click.