Iris 1.0
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:
Update (2026-05-29): Tyler Hall:
ATP 561 [talked] about how to handle photos with “don’t care” dates. Stuff like “1960s” that can’t be pinned to a specific date/time. […] I’m not sure if what Iris does is the best approach, but you can assign a decade, year, or month (or any combination of those) and it’ll bucket it into an “approximate” section where it makes sense.
But that is not the coolest part. No, that is that it lets you explore your tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of photos in a way that treats each of them as little memory boxes. So often, it is not just a picture of your kid, or your dog, or your dinner; it is a time you would like to remember. There are a bunch of things in each file that can bring you back to that moment. Photos does a poor job of that; Iris, on the other hand, is made for exactly that, something Hall takes seriously.
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I looked at the site but found that you only offer it as a standalone if you have Apple Pay and since I hardly buy anything on the app store anymore my balance is closed to 0. The disturbing thing I am finding is that the more people move away from the Appstore and move to other sites they offer limited pay options. Either it is a Credit Card (which are rip-offs for the amount of interest they charge on unpaid balances) or they use Goole Pay or Apple Pay). I use PayPal since most sites also don't like pre-paid Credit Cards since their subscription model get broken with them.
I'm one of those people who loves live photos, which is what keeps me trapped with Apple's obnoxious iOS 26 camera and also Photos. This doesn't seem to support those either. But I'll probably buy this anyway, because Photos just seems like a product that will only somehow keep getting worse.
When I moved to Europe I noticed the dire state of their online payment infrastructure. Credit cards are expensive, debit cards are either US-branded or not compatible across national boundaries, and WERO, the pan-Euroland payment system, might not ever outgrow its adolescent phase. Hence it is no surprise that many people resort to using unregulated fintechs, such as PayPal or Klarna for their online purchases. It is also sad and dangerous because there is little legislation in place preventing fintechs from monetising their customers' purchase data.
@Michael Tsai, you might want to tell Stripe that they lose customers if they do not accept European national banking cards such as GiroCard in Germany or CarteBleue in France, the two most powerful economies in the EU.
As far as I can tell, from a quick Google, Stripe does support both girocard and CarteBleu among other similar schemes. Maybe it's the case that a specific vendor has to choose to accept particular kinds of payment?
You (the commenters above) could try asking Tyler Hall, the app's developer, rather than you (Michael Tsai) if he can accept other payment methods via Stripe.
How refreshingly nice to see a piece of software sold as a single item rather than a subscription.
Love it. I hope we get to see a 2.0
Fight the enshittification
@OldCoot you don't have the option of a credit card that has no interest on the balance if you pay the whole outstanding amount at the end of each month/statement?
Iris looks like it fills a lot of Apple Photos gaps for me. Sounds super-complimentary. I’ll be buying it and hope to use it alongside Apple Photos (with its excellent cloud library). Looking forward to playing with it.
Photos really, really lacks good search and organization tools, especially as my library has grown exponentially. It’s so difficult to organize things in it, and the search just isn’t great for me. It really needs to be multi-windowed, IMO, and smart folders on iPad/iPhone, albums organizer, etc.
I like that Iris shows dates, people, locations in the sidebar and that the design of this is about finding, storytelling, and making sense of your library. That alone makes it worth it for me.
Software is about juggling priorities, and I like what this app is prioritizing.
I'm thinking about buying this one, looks nice. How does one edit the photos? Do I need a second app for that? Any recommendations what would work well?
