Hey everyone,
I’ve spent the last year building a native Mac app called Phosview (https://www.phosview.app), and I'm looking for some people to help me beta test it.
I’m not a professional photographer, but I got completely fed up with how messy and chaotic my photo library was. My files were scattered across different platforms and systems—some on my phone, others from a dedicated DSLR—and I lacked a central place to manage them all. On top of that, after my son's baseball games, I’d come home with thousands of photos to sort through. Most of them were just rapid-fire bursts, near-duplicates, or completely irrelevant, useless shots. Staring at a screen for hours just to clear out the junk and find the few good moments was driving me crazy, so I decided to build a tool to fix it.
It is completely free during this private beta. At official launch, it will be a $49 one-time purchase (with a $39 early-bird promo) and it will be available on Setapp.
The app requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. If you want to check it out, you can download the build at https://www.phosview.app and request a beta key on the site. The system will email you a key immediately.
I'll be keeping an eye on this thread if you have any questions about the architecture, local models, or performance. Let me know what you think!
I’ve spent the last year building a native Mac app called Phosview (https://www.phosview.app), and I'm looking for some people to help me beta test it.
I’m not a professional photographer, but I got completely fed up with how messy and chaotic my photo library was. My files were scattered across different platforms and systems—some on my phone, others from a dedicated DSLR—and I lacked a central place to manage them all. On top of that, after my son's baseball games, I’d come home with thousands of photos to sort through. Most of them were just rapid-fire bursts, near-duplicates, or completely irrelevant, useless shots. Staring at a screen for hours just to clear out the junk and find the few good moments was driving me crazy, so I decided to build a tool to fix it.
What it is
Phosview acts as a central, local-first hub for sorting, managing, and culling huge photo libraries (RAW, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF). Instead of forcing you into a cloud-dependent subscription or lagging under heavy files, it runs completely on your machine and uses local AI to group your images and find your best shots.How it works under the hood
- Split-process engine: I separated the UI from the heavy background work like RAW decoding and indexing. This keeps the interface smooth and responsive at 60fps, even when the engine is processing thousands of files in the background. It also allows you to upgrade the processing part of the app to a machine with better AI capabilities down the road.
- 100% local AI: All the semantic search and technical scoring run entirely on your Mac using the Apple Silicon Neural Engine. Zero photos are uploaded to the cloud.
- Instant previews: It pulls the embedded JPEGs from RAW files so you can sweep through massive catalogs without waiting for rendering lag. If you use Lightroom, you can see your edits and your Lightroom metadata right in the app.
- Natural language search: You don't have to tag anything manually. You can just type what you remember, like "kid sliding into home at golden hour" or "dog catching a frisbee."
- Smart collections: You can save any of those search queries as a collection, and it will keep itself updated automatically as you add new photos to your Mac.
- Taming duplicates and bursts: It finds exact copies and near-duplicates, collapsing heavy burst sequences into a single group with the best shot automatically ranked on top so you can clear drive space in a single pass.
- Non-destructive: Your originals are safe. The app only reads your files and keeps your decisions in its own sidecar database; it never alters the original images.
It is completely free during this private beta. At official launch, it will be a $49 one-time purchase (with a $39 early-bird promo) and it will be available on Setapp.
The app requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. If you want to check it out, you can download the build at https://www.phosview.app and request a beta key on the site. The system will email you a key immediately.
I'll be keeping an eye on this thread if you have any questions about the architecture, local models, or performance. Let me know what you think!