sidasa
tylerhallIris for macOS is available. It's the native photo and video library I always wanted. I hope you like it, too. https://irisphotos.app
Obligatory blog post: https://tyler.io/2026/05/27/fossils-in-the-ground/
I look forward to finding out what terrible thing I’ve forgotten about / missed / did wrong / did not do. There’s always something with something new.
Matt Godden@tylerhall Can I have a separate persistent viewer window, that shows the full size image, when I click a thumbnail image in the browser / thumbnail view window?
@metaning Good idea. An earlier version offered something like that. I’ll try and bring it back.
@tylerhall if you can do that, and stretch goal, make the metadata inspector side pane a tear-off, you'd win a huuuuuuge quantity of the Aperture-missers.
Live view of the filesystem, so I could arbitrarily add a folder where the originals for all of my cameras have their images stored, and then when I add files in Finder, they're automatically in Iris, is a particular hole in Mac image workflows right now.
Details here if you're interested:
https://www.mattgodden.com/2025/12/24/refining-image-ingestion/
https://www.mattgodden.com/2023/11/23/solve-for-a/
NerdRelaxo@tylerhall The first thing you maybe forgot is a name search/trademark search etc.? Or is https://irisphoto.app (without s) also your site? Hope you don't get problems with them if not.
kcǃ@tylerhall The website mentions that the Mac App Store includes family sharing... but I'd rather purchase direct from you so you get more of the full price...
Does the direct-purchase app also allow sharing the app with family members? Or is it limited to a single computer?
@exkclamation Thanks for thinking of that. The direct-purchase version supports sharing with family members by sharing your serial number with them 😉
Secundus@tylerhall @exkclamation Ah, perfect. My question exactly ☺️
Michael Hanscom@tylerhall This looks really nifty, and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
One question and one thought:
Question (which I think I've picked up the answer too, but want to be sure): Does it play nicely with Apple Photos if you keep using Photos? That is, if I keep adding photos to Photos (ugh, I hate modern naming conventions), will Iris pick them up (immediately, soon, or on next launch)? If I add photos to Iris, will Photos pick them up? Mainly, I have enough photos that I value Apple's "keep screen res on-device, download the high-res when requested" approach, so might want to continue using Photos on the backend even if I move to Iris as my primary front end. Plus, it's nice having iPhone photos just magically appear in my library without having to manually move them in.
Thought: Triggered by the bit in the blog post about the Explore Mode's “b/c a photo can’t be in more than one at a time” — maybe they can? Not really _in_ more than one place at a time, but with landscape photos, I often tag mine with both where I was when I shot it and what I'm looking towards, like this shot of Mt. Hood (in Oregon) shot from Fort Vancouver (in Washington): https://www.flickr.com/photos/djwudi/55220297880/in/dateposted-public/ Not sure that helps or hurts the thought process for that mode, but it popped into my head.
Mt. Hood
@djwudi It’s best to think of Iris as a “read-only lens” on top of a “source” of photos/videos.
A source could be Apple Photos, or a folder on your Mac, or an external drive, or even a NAS. And you can connect as many sources as you want.
Iris scans your files, indexes them, makes thumbnails, and keeps a database of cached metadata. It never writes back to your files or Apple Photos.
As you add new photos to your sources, Iris will (not instantly) find them, index the new ones, and make them visible in Iris.
If you disconnect a source (unplug a hard drive, etc) Iris will keep working just fine. You can search and browse as usual - although you’ll see Iris’s thumbnails instead of the full-res originals.
@tylerhall Gotcha, thanks! That's what I thought would be the answer, but it was worth asking. Much appreciated!
matt sephton@tylerhall congrats on finally getting it out there! top marks for perseverance
Iris includes a built-in web server and API that let's you view and search your library through your web browser - and also from Apple TV and iOS companion apps.
The tvOS app is live in the App Store now. iOS coming very soon.
And for you Tailscale nerds, that means remotely viewing your library is easy, too.
thaddeus:~$@tylerhall this is one of my favorite features. So well done, and exactly the kind of thing indie developers understand the value of. ❤️
Alex Kretzschmar@tylerhall sorely needed. Looks great, will give it a spin soon.
WTL@tylerhall Can the tvOS app act as the screensaver instead of using Photos?
@WTL Not as a real Apple TV screensaver, no. (Unless there's some API I don't know about...I'll check.) And there's no built-in "play a slideshow" feature in the app yet, but it's on my short-term roadmap.
@tylerhall That would be great. Right now, we use a Shared Album for the screen saver, but the TV makes strange choices with cropping some of the photos and memes.
@tylerhall Does the Mac App Store version share automatically with tvOS and iOS without turning on the web server? Or is the server required either way?
@exkclamation Both versions (Mac App Store and direct download) require the server is required to be turned on. (To be clear: the server is built directly into Iris - it’s not a separate thing running on your Mac.)
Roger@tylerhall Enjoying IRIS. Could be just what I need. TV app is fast! Except for .jxl which renders it almost unusable. TV app needs to sort this or transcode on server?
@RogerShepherd Good catch - I don't think I ever tested jxl on the TV app. I've logged a bug to investigate and fix.
@tylerhall I’ve sent a couple of e-mails about more of my experience to help@…. is that the best way of giving feedback?
@RogerShepherd Yep - email is great. I got and read yours - great feedback, but I'm running behind on actually replying to everyone right now.
@tylerhall “running behind” - sign of success
Karin Dalziel@tylerhall Oh this looks fantastic, I will be looking at it after work
Andy@tylerhall ooh, that looks fantastic.
Jonathan Gerlach@tylerhall Contrats! 💪
basile@tylerhall congrats!!
Marvin R@tylerhall looking forward to checking it out - looks really cool!
From the website it seems this would not work well with iCloud Photo Library (with optimize storage)?
I probably need to find some external drive to download all my photos 🤔
From the website it seems this would not work well with iCloud Photo Library (with optimize storage)?
I probably need to find some external drive to download all my photos 🤔
@marv51 Yep. Iris will do its best with cloud-only photos. Will try and find the best available thumbnail. But definitely works better with Apple Photos when everything is downloaded offline.
Ali Alm@tylerhall @marv51 what limitations should I expect with an optimized photo library? I’m willing to sacrifice the thumbnails as they’re not critical to me. But will it still read all the metadata and offer stats? Will search still work as expected? Will I have the spreadsheet?
@AliAlmo @marv51 Stats and search will still work, but with the caveat: If the original files aren't available on disk, Iris will still import whatever it can read from the Photos database. But metadata that is only in the original files won't be available. If Iris is able to get a cached thumbnail from Apple Photos, it will attempt to scan faces / do ML stuff on that - but the original file would be best.
plainmindapp@tylerhall Great looking app. I love the simplicity of the layout. Great work
@tylerhall looks just what I need. How does the app find duplicates? By file name or time or by the look of the photo? I have many duplicates such as the original + a low quality WhatsApp / social media copy.
@someoneonmastodon A few different metrics with varying levels of confidence. Are the files byte identical? Same size and/or filename? Are they visually similar?
Josh S@tylerhall Ahhh just being able to reliably search by camera is so huge. Can’t wait to play with this.
Alexander Rutz@tylerhall Lovely, this looks and sounds really nice! Is it oblivious of raw files though? (If so, it might be an option to load the raw file’s jpeg previews in order to avoid having to deal with the myriad of different raw file types.)
EDIT: Sorry, it does read RAW but apparently no Fuji for example?
@animaux Iris uses macOS's native frameworks to read RAW files. I'm limited to what they support. If there's an image that you think should be supported and isn't, I'm happy to take a look if you feel comfortable emailing it to me.
@tylerhall Thanks for getting back. Yes, looks like Fujis RAFs are not supported by macOS itself. You are probably bombarded by feature requests now, but ;) What I was instantly missing was keyboard navigation through the grid via arrow keys and also page-wise and start/end-keys. Also the Keywords are still very »interesting«. Apart from all that, very nice, what an effort to make this, I’m totally impressed!
@tylerhall OK, the issue is apparently Fuji RAFs with compression. No simple way around it I guess —> https://www.dpreview.com/forums/threads/fuji-x-t4-raf-files-view-in-finder.4658002/
Fuji X-T4 RAF files view in finder ?
Hi, I shoot RAW only and my previous camera was producing DNG files. I just bought a fuji X-T4 that produce RAF files. This file don't show thumbnails in the finder. (Mac OS Monterey 12.4). I know I can import to LR and will see the files but it's would be easier to see the pictures in finder...
Mark Derricutt (talios)@animaux @tylerhall Between this and PhotoCuller I think I might be in workflow heaven. PC uses apples lib with fallback to a thirdparty library and handles RAFs fine. Must go install this and try it out!
@animaux Moving around the grid with arrow keys isn’t working? Or is it not behaving as you’d expect?
Thomas Blätte@tylerhall I don’t know if @animaux experiences the same, but for me left/right arrow keys don’t work at the start/end of a row. If I press the left arrow key on the beginning of a row, the focus jumps to the side bar. If I press „right“ at the end of a row, nothing happens (though this might be intended). I’d prefer if the selection jumps to the previous/next photo on the line above/below. (I‘m still on Sequoia)
@tblaette @tylerhall I didn’t work at all, but trying again now it does. I’d second the expected jump to next row on row end, or previous row on start. At the moment it jumps to the sidebar. Also the Page- and Start-/End keys would be nice to have. (Sequioa too)
Brian Gerfort🇺🇦
@tylerhall Mac-assed! 👍👍
Todd Vaziri@tylerhall This looks incredibly cool but I’d say you need to make it even clearer in your messaging that this will not alter your Photos.app library at all, and that it’s completely separate. I think many potential customers might be nervous that it will alter their heavily curated Photos.app library work.
@tvaziri I was chatting with a mutual friend about this last night and realized holy shit, yes, that isn't made clear enough. I'll get the website and docs updated. Thanks for calling that out!
@tylerhall very cool - looks great, and I can't wait to try it
Ryan Carver@tylerhall congrats! This is very cool, I look forward to spending some time with it.
Joshua Graves@tylerhall @tylersticka I'm really happy about this! I've de-iClouded my library, and Apple deliberately makes it suck. I'm gonna give it a go.
@tylerhall I've been playing around with Iris for ten minutes and I'm already really enjoying it. Pretty good deal at ~$20(🇨🇦).
bbech@tylerhall does this work on top of my photo library or is it separate?
@bbech On top of your existing Photos library or folders of photos on disk. Iris *never* touches your original files or modifies your existing library. More info: https://irisphotos.app/support/
Eric Peacock@bbech @tylerhall Technically anything can work with your Photos library b/c the "Photos Library.photoslibrary" data is actually a folder, and inside is an "originals" folder with unedited source media!
It's nice that Apple is only hiding the "guts" of your Photos data, and you can get to it via "Show Package Contents" — and point other apps like Iris Photos to read/scan that folder.
However, doing this sort-of-thing with an app that doesn't "read-only" is risky!
@evilpeacock @bbech Just to be clear, Iris is definitely read-only. It *never* edits or moves your original files or modifies your Photos library in any way.