Tyler Hall (Mastodon):
The first version, from November 2020, was called AntiPhoto. The name was a mood. I had tens of thousands of photos and videos scattered across drives and old phone backups, and Apple Photos wanted me to live inside its library, on its terms. I didn’t want a walled garden. I wanted something that could point at a messy folder and just make sense of it.
[…]
For every dreamy sketch there were months of deeply unglamorous hitting my head against the wall, none of which makes a good screenshot. The single hardest problem was often just scrolling. A photo library isn’t 200 items, it’s 200,000+, and they all have different aspect ratios, and you want a buttery justified grid that never stutters. I have a screen recording I named “100k Spinning Scroll” from April 2022 — the day a library of 101,706 items finally scrolled without choking — and I remember it feeling like a bigger win than any feature. But even today, Iris has performance hiccups — especially around complex searches and truly massive libraries. But if I waited to solve every bug, I’d never ship.
[…]
I set out to build an anti-Photos utility — a search engine for a hard drive. What I actually ended up with is a memory keeper. Open a photo today and Iris tells you the date, surfaces “16 items on this day,” drops a pin on the map, and lists the people in the frame with their ages quietly calculated from their birthdays.
It’s now available:
Somewhere along the way, “your library” turned into “an account someone else owns.” That’s not the future we want. Iris reads from the folders or Apple Photos library you already have, builds a fast and intelligent library on your Mac, and leaves the originals exactly where you put them. No cloud. No accounts. Your memories are yours.
$14, no subscription, either direct or from the Mac App Store.
Previously:
Iris Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Photography
Ben Sandofsky:
Mark III is now available in the App Store. This post highlights the major new features, starting with Looks, which produce gorgeous photos straight-out-of-camera.
[…]
Inspired by “Less, but better,” we partnered with the renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly to develop a succinct set of gorgeous, physically accurate processes exclusive to Halide. Each look was engineered with a specific intent. We verified every look thousands of times on real-world reference photos.
[…]
As Mark III became better and better, I actually missed its results when I reached for a standalone camera. I figured a lot of people might feel the same. So we’re excited to announce that Halide now lets you import RAW files from standalone cameras to apply the same magic that defines Halide.
I like the idea of looks, and the Apple vs. Halide Rembrandt comparison is striking, but I don’t like the workflow of making these decisions from my phone.
Previously:
Halide High Dynamic Range (HDR) iOS iOS 26 iOS App Photography Raw Image Format
John Gruber:
!Camera’s use of LUTs for filter-like effects opens the app to a wide world of non-proprietary looks. The best source I’ve found for new LUTs to import is the Panasonic LUMIX Lab app — Panasonic’s built-in LUTs are boring, but the app has a whole community of user-submitted LUTs and I’ve found several of them that are lovely. !Camera’s custom “SuperRAW” format, is, in my opinion, key to the appeal of the app:
No more flat lifeless photos, no AI processing, no weird
artifacts. Our SuperRaw™ photo processing has been crafted to
showcase more film-like tones and preserve a photo’s beautiful
natural grain.
Previously:
!Camera iOS iOS 26 iOS App
Allison Johnson (2025):
Adobe’s Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds. It’s the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo’s basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera — just the thing for a camera nerd like me.
If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you’re tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It’s available in beta on iOS, though it is not — and I stress this — for the faint of heart. It’s slow, it’s prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it’s the most thoughtfully designed camera experience I’ve ever used on a phone, and it gave me a renewed sense of curiosity about the camera I use every day.
Joe Rosensteel:
I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps. But Adobe also says they’re targeting “casual” photographers, which seems misguided.
[…]
You can’t adjust the tone mapping like you can with Photographic Styles. You’re supposed to take it into Lightroom and treat it like the RAW output of a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
The default result tends to be much more naturalistic than the Camera app.
John Gruber:
I’m deeply intrigued by Indigo, and I have a few friends who’ve shown me some extraordinary photographs taken with the app. If they hadn’t told me, I’d have wagered their photos were taken with dedicated large-sensor digital cameras, not phones.
Previously:
iOS iOS 26 iOS App Photography Project Indigo
Jeremy Gray (2025):
Unpro Camera promises “that unprocessed look” that has become popular lately and is in the same vein as Halide’s Process Zero option.
[…]
Unpro not only aims to produce a more retro-looking image, free from modern smartphone processing techniques, but the app also channels old-school vibes through its design and user interface. Unpro sports a skeuomorphic design, meaning that it digitally recreates real-world objects. In this case, the app has a shiny-looking virtual shutter release, a faux leather texture like a camera’s grip, and pseudo-illuminated icons for things like AF/AE locking and zoom mode. It is worth noting the buttons in the UI don’t move around — they’re always in the same location — which the developer says makes it easier to learn how to use.
Uncorrelated Contents:
Unlike most camera apps, Unpro features a carefully-crafted photo processing pipeline that produces excellent JPEG renditions of RAW and ProRAW photos without the need for manual editing.
[…]
Another feature that, as far as I know, is unique to Unpro: the ability to capture a RAW and ProRAW (or RAW + a deprocessed photo) in rapid succession.
Previously:
iOS iOS 26 iOS App Photography Raw Image Format Unpro Camera
