{"id":52025,"date":"2026-05-27T14:51:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T18:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=52025"},"modified":"2026-05-27T14:51:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T18:51:23","slug":"iris-1-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/27\/iris-1-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Iris 1.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tyler Hall<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The first version, from November 2020, was called AntiPhoto. The name was a mood<\/em>. 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<\/em> library, on its<\/em> terms. I didn’t want a walled garden. I wanted something that could point at a messy folder and just make sense of it.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I set out to build an anti-Photos utility<\/em> — 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s now available<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

$14, no subscription, either direct or from the Mac App Store.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n