Iris: Photo & Video Library

Your photos, fully yours.

Iris is the native Mac photo library that helps you find, explore, and rediscover the people, places, and moments you love — privately, on your own computer, with the smarts of a cloud service and none of the cost.

Photos used to live on your Mac. With Iris, they still do. Iris reads from the folders, external drives, or Photos library you already have, builds a fast, intelligent library on your Mac, and leaves your originals exactly where you put them. No cloud. No accounts. No subscription. Your memories are yours.

Iris is for people who love their photos — family historians, archivists, and anyone who believes their library is worth keeping in a private, future-proof form that will outlive their grandchildren.

FIND YOUR PEOPLE

Iris recognizes the people in your photos using on-device machine learning — no face ever leaves your Mac. Browse by age, search by name, and watch your kids grow up. See how old everyone was the day a photo was taken, and let birthdays surface the people you love from years past.

FIND YOUR PLACES

Plot every photo on a map and rediscover where you've been. Jump to nearby photos, bookmark your favorite locations, and use Photo Trails to retrace your hikes, road trips, and favorite spots.

FIND YOUR MOMENTS

Modern cameras give you exact dates. A scanned photo from the 1980s doesn't. Iris lets you assign an approximate month, year, or decade when you don't know exactly when — so your whole family album fits inside a single timeline.

MORE THAN A SEARCH BOX

Search, sort, and filter by any criteria. Iris extracts the text from your photos — signs, menus, receipts, handwriting — and transcribes the speech in your videos, then makes it all instantly searchable with a fast, powerful UI that uncovers the needle in your haystack.

YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY, BY THE NUMBERS

Iris turns your library into a window on your life with rich stats — how many photos you take, when you take them, the cameras you use, and the people and places that show up most.

BUILT LIKE A REAL MAC APP

• Open as many windows and tabs as you like

• List view: a fast, sortable table with configurable columns for date, camera, lens, location, file size, and dozens more

• Quick switcher — hit Command-K to jump anywhere in your library

• Select and copy the text straight out of your photos

• Surprise Me! puts your whole library on shuffle to rediscover forgotten favorites

• Share slideshows over FaceTime to gather everyone around the photos

• A built-in MCP server lets Claude and other AI tools search your library — locally, with your permission

100% PRIVATE BY DESIGN

Iris never edits, moves, or renames your originals. There are no accounts and no cloud servers, and no data ever leaves your Mac without your permission. The library lives on your Mac. Your memories, on your computer. Full stop.

No accounts, no servers, no sign-ups, no nonsense.

Made with care, on a Mac, in Richmond, Virginia, by Retina Studio.