His iPhone photos and videos always have this amazing cinematic look. Is he using a filter, preset, or manual settings? How does he achieve it?

Somewhere in your Photos library there is a number that says how pleasantly symmetrical each of your pictures is. There's another one for reflections. One for camera tilt. One called ZFAILURESCORE, which I assume is Apple being polite.

Photos computes all of this on your Mac, stores it, uses a sliver of it for Memories — and then shows you a grid sorted by date.

I got tired of that and built something to get at it. Then I gave it away for free, because apparently that's who I am now.

What's actually in there

Every asset has scores like ZOVERALLAESTHETICSCORE, ZCURATIONSCORE and ZICONICSCORE, plus a long tail of per-attribute ones: pleasant composition, pleasant lighting, interesting subject, well-timed shot, sharply focused subject, lively colour, harmonious colour, tastefully blurred, pleasant perspective, symmetry, patterns, reflections, post-processing, camera tilt, noise, intrusive object presence, low light, immersiveness, activity, and a wallpaper score. About three dozen usable ones once you throw out the dead columns.

The best thing I found is a small scandal. The Screenshots album goes by file type. The database also has ZISDETECTEDSCREENSHOT, which is a recognition result — so it also catches photos you took of a screen, and images you saved from the web. It's a bigger and far more useful set. Same engine, two different questions, and you were handed the worse one.

The app

Mac app called lightbrary. One grid, and everything is a filter on it: rating, any of those measures as a range slider drawn over a histogram of your actual library, so you can see where the weird tail is and grab it. Rate with the keyboard, compare two frames side by side, mark for deletion, then filter to what you marked and get rid of it in one go. There's an iPhone companion for rating on the couch that syncs over a file.

It does not upload anything. There's no account, no analytics, no network calls at all — the only exception is a "check for updates" menu item that you have to click yourself.

The honest part

• Mac only. Free. Not on the App Store — Developer ID signed and notarised, so it just opens.

• The interesting half needs Full Disk Access, because those scores live in Photos.sqlite and PhotoKit doesn't expose them. I'm aware how that sounds. Basic browsing and rating works without it.

• It's early. It will have bugs. That's most of why I'm posting.

https://lightbrary.app

What I'm actually asking for

Go and poke at it. Point it at your own library, pull the sliders around, and see what falls out.

Specifically, I'd love to hear:

• Which measure turned out to be useful, and which is noise. I picked these three dozen because they looked interesting to me, not because I've proven any of them work. curation and iconic in particular — I genuinely don't know what Apple means by them, and you'll find out at the same time I do.

• What you'd sort by that isn't there. I clean out screenshots; you probably do something else entirely. The list is easy to extend if someone tells me what's missing.

• Where the thing lies to you. If a filter claims 2,000 photos and shows you 18,000, I want to know. That exact bug already happened once.

• Whether the names make sense. They're my translations of what the columns seem to do, and I'm not confident in several of them.

I'm not looking for feature requests so much as for findings — you have a library I'll never see, and the whole point of this thing is that libraries differ.

I got tired of paying Apple every month to keep my own photos, so I moved ~85,000 photos and videos to my own server (Immich) and switched iCloud Photos off.

The problem: every Immich app I tried felt nothing like the Photos app I was used to. So I built my own.

HomeRoll is a native iOS 26 app (SwiftUI + UIKit) that looks and behaves like Apple Photos, but everything lives on hardware you own.

How I got it this close: I took Apple’s Photos frameworks from iOS 26.3 apart and went through all 226 actions the Photos app can perform (copy edits, print, hide, set key photo, show fewer memories, drag to album, Spotlight …). 147 of them now work in HomeRoll. 62 are iCloud/Apple-service only, 16 are Apple-internal, 1 isn’t possible on iOS. 140 of the 147 are covered by automated UI tests.

What’s in it

• Library with the same pinch-to-zoom grid, Years / Months / All, Today / Yesterday / weekday titles

• Viewer with the Apple-style preview strip and smooth video scrubbing, Live Photos, HDR originals

• Editor: light, color, filters, styles, crop, copy and paste edits

• Memories, featured photos, people, places, birthdays

• Search for receipts, documents, handwriting, QR codes, screenshots, selfies …

• Album folders, drag photos onto albums, Spotlight search for albums and people

• Backup: new photos and videos go to your server automatically, in the background while the iPhone charges

• Free Up Space: deletes only what’s verified to be on your server (checksum + server check)

• Widgets and a share extension

Stack: your own Immich server (tested with v3.3.5) + this app. English and German.

It’s free and MIT licensed:
https://github.com/silentprovider423/HomeRoll

Not affiliated with Apple or Immich/FUTO. Happy to answer questions about the setup or the reverse engineering.

__EDITED:

i just dropped a Mac Version if needed: https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplePhotos/comments/1xqilx8/after_the_iphone_i_reverseengineered_apples/

I’m not trying to bash Apple — I’m genuinely trying to understand what safe options people are using.

I’ve got a large photo library, mostly family stuff, and it feels like once everything is in iCloud, you’re basically stuck paying indefinitely unless you’re willing to risk messing something up.

Most of the advice I see is either:

- “Just download everything” (which doesn’t scale well)

- or very technical workflows that feel risky for normal users

My biggest concern is safety — making sure there’s a verified copy *before* anything gets removed locally.

For people who’ve actually done this successfully: how are you approaching it without risking data loss?

I built a software that allows you to possibly get up to 3-4 years of permanently deleted photos back from your iphone! This only works if the iphone hasn’t been fully reset!

The software shows what your iphone might have for free!

http://retrievalp.com

PS. The software is still waiting on Azure’s identity verification, which can take up to 20 days. This is why windows might say that its unknown publisher!

On iPhone, All Photos is just one giant dump — every screenshot, WhatsApp forward, screen recording, and camera shot all mixed together. Albums feel like tiny side-categories inside this endless library.

On Samsung/Android, it’s so much simpler: All Photos is just the total of your albums, with a clear Camera folder and easy navigation. Logical, clean, and way less messy.

Do you guys also find the iPhone Photos app frustrating? Any third-party apps or tricks to make it behave more like Android’s gallery?

Lately I’ve been wondering if Apple Photos has been getting more and more complex every year.

I’ve always loved Apple’s focus on clean design and usability. My first iPhone was the 4s back in 2011 and I’ve upgraded pretty much every year since then.

But in the last two iOS versions I’ve noticed a pretty big decline in how intuitive the Photos app feels.

iOS 26 the new menu feels awkward. They tried to simplify things by reducing everything to Library, Collections and Search, but it ends up feeling harder to navigate. When I’m in Library, the back gesture sometimes switches the layout between Days, Months and Years instead of actually going back.

And when I’m in Collections there are so many categories and menus that I honestly don’t even know where to start.

Is anyone else feeling the same, or am I just overthinking it?

Link to non-paywalled story.

Yesterday I posted HomeRoll, my reverse-engineered Apple Photos clone for iPhone that runs on my own server instead of iCloud. The most asked question: “what about the Mac?”

So I did the same thing with Photos for Mac.

I took Apple’s Photos app on macOS apart: 1,256 classes, 101 actions, all 211 menu items (157 with their internal action names and keyboard shortcuts, pulled straight out of the compiled menu file) and 3,525 interface texts. Then I rebuilt it piece by piece as a native Mac app. Same sidebar, same menus, same shortcuts, same editing tools.

The result is HomeRoll Desktop: Photos for Mac, but your library lives on your own server (Immich does the storage, faces and search). No iCloud, no monthly fee, ~85,000 photos and videos running smooth.

What’s in it

• Sidebar like Photos: Library, Memories, People, Map, Albums, media types, Hidden, Recently Deleted

• Years / Months / All Photos, pinch-to-zoom grid, built for 80k+ items

• Viewer and Info panel (⌘I), keyboard shortcuts exactly like Photos

• Editor with the same engine as the iPhone app: 15 adjustments + Auto, filters, styles, crop/straighten/perspective, curves, levels, selective color. Edit on the Mac, it looks the same on your iPhone

• Smart albums with rules (⌥⌘N), duplicates, people (rename, merge, hide)

• Import from Finder or straight from Apple’s Photos app on your Mac, export, print

• Multiple accounts, “view only” mode per account

Free, MIT licensed, no tracking, talks only to your own server. macOS 15+.

Mac: https://github.com/silentprovider423/HomeRoll-Desk
iPhone: https://github.com/silentprovider423/HomeRoll

Not affiliated with Apple or Immich/FUTO. Screenshots use public domain NASA photos. Happy to answer questions about the reverse engineering.

*Any more ideas for new apps where you want to own your own data?*

Hi all,

Just wanted to pass along this info if you’re like me and had somehow never discovered it.

TL/DR if you import from an SD card or camera directly to your iPhone using Photos, you can long press on a thumbnail to switch to a zoomed-in photo-by-photo viewer mode.

I use Apple Photos as my main photo library manager. My normal workflow is take photos on camera, then connect my camera directly to iPhone via USB C cable or a USB C card reader. After connecting, the Import tab appears in the Photos app. The default view is a thumbnail grid that is separated by calendar date.

I don’t normally cull in camera - I am usually traveling when I take photos so I want to save battery and enjoy my trip. However the default view on the import tab is a very small thumbnails, which makes it impossible to even see if I nailed focus. The result is I end up importing everything to my phone and telling myself I’ll cull later. Work-arounds were importing using Photomator which has a much better import viewer.

However yesterday I accidentally discovered that if you long press a thumbnail you get a zoomed in view of just that photo, with a film strip at the bottom! It‘s zoomed in enough to check focus an even select the best out of a series. This ensures only potential keepers end up in my library.

I’m hoping to find someone who also didn’t know this view existed - let me know!

I've got a massive iCloud library: over 260,000 photos and 10,000 videos. It's 2.7 TB.

It's big because I have kids that were born into the iPhone era. We take pictures of them and our family life almost every day. They're the first generation that will be able to scroll through images of practically every day of their lives.

We don't think we're obsessive, just lazy. It's so easy to snap photos on the iPhone and we usually take multiple quick shots to get a "good one" instead of carefully framing and checking. As a result we've averaged over 50 shots a day over the life of our kids. We rarely edit them down.

iCloud has worked well for us, but I decided I wanted to back them up locally. These memories are priceless and we would be devastated if we lost access to our iCloud account or suffered a catastrophic data loss bug. My plan is to do a full backup onto an external drive and then disconnect it as "cold storage", updating it every now and then.

Here's my setup:

• Western Digital 8TB Elements USB 3.0 external drive ($150)

• Brand new M5 MacBook Pro, 24GB RAM

• Gigibit broadband connection via ethernet

I leave the MacBook on a desk with the drive plugged in. I formatted it APFS with Disk Utility. I moved my photo library to the drive and set it as my system photo library. Then I enabled iCloud Photos and set it to "Download Originals to Mac".

I leave it running all the time. To make sure my Mac doesn't go to sleep, under Battery settings I set "Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off." I hear the drive seeking all day and night, so I know it's working.

My experience so far: It's reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally slow.

First it took several days of just doing some kind of preparation and downloading zero originals. The drive was furiously working the whole time but barely using any disk space.

Then it started downloading originals. Over the past couple weeks it's averaged about 4.4 items per minute. At that rate it will take about six more weeks to finish.

I cross checked this with overall disk space consumption: 645 GB out of 2700 GB. That also predicts about 6 more weeks.

Why is it so slow? I don't really know. At an average item size of just 10MB, my broadband is more than fast enough, and simple copies of files to the drive via Finder are in excess of 100 MB/sec, more than fast enough.

One theory is that Photos is doing a huge number of reads causing the drive to get bogged down seeking. Activity Monitor shows the drive is doing a bunch of reads all the time at around 2 MB/sec. Drives that are fast at big contiguous file transfers can be slow at fragmented seeking. It is extremely sluggish when I try to scroll through my library. A solid state drive would rule this out but they're too expensive for a multi-terabyte backup. Maybe a 7200 RPM drive would help.

Another theory is that I'm getting rate limited by iCloud. Averaged over two weeks by rate is 0.73 MB/sec which doesn't seem like much, but who knows.

In short, so far it seems to be working but you might not want to cheap out on the drive like I did.

UPDATE: Thanks to insightful commenters, it looks like I formatted my drive the wrong way. APFS is optimized for SSD drives and can cause the excessive seeking I am seeing on my non-SSD spinning disk drive. I'm going to reformat and try again. Also Apple offers a data download service and there are third party downloaders that might be faster.

UPDATE 2: I reformatted by drive to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" and I am seeing a 50% improvement! It's still quite slow and will take about a month at this rate.

UPDATE 3: I tried using privacy.apple.com to download my data and it's a nightmare. Even at the largest chunk setting my library is 65 parts ~40 GB each and Apple throttles the download at ~100 Mbps. That means each chunk takes about an hour and they disconnect all the time. If you don't babysit the computer and immediately resume, your session times out and you have to start the download again. It's a totally manual process and not viable for a normal person with stuff to do at all. I even tried configuring a download manager to do it for me but I haven't found one that will auto-resume failed downloads. So I've giving up on this -- I'd rather wait a month for my sync to complete. (Also, what you get from privacy.download.com is its own archive folder structure, not a native Photos library.)

Parachute Backup is a set-and-forget backup companion for iOS. It automatically syncs your memories—photos, videos, and documents—from iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive to your own storage (USB drive, network drive/NAS, Google Drive, S3 and more), giving you peace of mind and full control. You can manually run backups, or setup scheduled backups to kickoff automatically.

Parachute Backup for Mac has been very well received, but the number one as was to build a version for iOS -- enabling friends and family without a Mac to backup as well!

Available on the App Store for $3.99, family sharing enabled https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup-mobile/id6749824842

I have a little over 16k items (15.5k photos, 923 videos) in my iCloud Photo Library. They're meticulously organized and my family's amazed at how I can find anything I want in seconds.

I'm paying for the 200gb tier, and my library by itself takes up more than half of it. I really don't want to have to upgrade to the 2TB plan, and I really value having them all in one library. I cull regularly and aggressively, but naturally the library continues to grow year after year. I compress long videos (saving trimmed videos as New Files and deleting the original), and edit sets of videos from events into single compilation movies of highlights. I record video at 1080/60 and High Efficiency formats, and only use Live when the moment calls for it.

Photo organization/purging is a very enjoyable task for me. I love seeing how ruthless I can be as their meaning and value change over time. But I've culled earlier years so many times that the remaining photos are pretty much here to stay as definitive representations of that era, and I get to a point of diminishing returns where I wonder if I'm deleting memories for the sake of deleting something. So far, I haven't missed anything I've deleted.

What do you do to manage photo inflow? What pro tips do you have for curation and optimization?

Basically the title. I didn’t like how the default iPhone camera auto-sharpened and brightened my photos. In selfies it exaggerated my pores and lines, and in regular photos the colors looked dull and either way too dark or strangely bright.

The only workaround I found was selecting a live photo frame, but this caused the image to be cropped and low quality. Because of this, I built Unenhanced, a super simple camera app that takes photos without the auto-enhanced look. Your photos will match what you see in the camera preview, and it also support live photos and flash.

You can check it out here! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unenhanced/id6759062864

I would love to hear feedback and thoughts on this! Sharing in case anyone else had the same problem with the default iPhone camera lol

Hey r/ApplePhotos,

Is anyone else struggling with the new Photos app in iOS 18? I'm finding it incredibly frustrating to navigate and use efficiently. Here are some of my main gripes:

1. The unified design is confusing. I miss the separate tabs for Library, For You, and Albums.

2. Finding specific images is now a chore. The removal of the Days view option has made it harder to locate recent photos.

3. The new layout feels cluttered. Displaying 30 images at once on the main screen is overwhelming.

4. Customization options are buried. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the "Customize & Reorder" button.

5. The swipe gestures for adjusting the view are not intuitive. You need to swipe down to the full Photo Library view first.

I've tried some of the suggested fixes, like customizing the layout and using the sort options, but it still feels like a step backward in usability.

I'm seriously considering developing an alternative photo app that addresses these issues.

What are your TOP 3 pain points with the current iOS Photos app?

What features would make you immediately download and switch to a new photo management app?

I'm not selling anything. Just genuinely want to understand what the community needs. Your input could shape a potential solution that actually works for photographers, memory keepers, and casual users.

Drop your thoughts below! 👇

Hi!

TL;DR: I made iCloud photos/videos backup tool for Mac. Free to download from Github, small fee from App Store.

(Yet another "hey I made an app" post 😅)

I used iCloud as an only storage for my photos. For a long time I've had the idea to keep a local backup of them, just in case something happens to my iCloud account. As a software developer, I of course wanted to build a tool for automating that work.

At work I've been developing with Typescript, C#, Python, C++, Dart (and some other languages), but not with Swift, so I saw my chance to get familiar with it here.

So why Photo Export? I want to keep a local backup of photos and videos in Year/Month folders, so that's what Photo Export does. Export everything at once or month by month. It keeps track what you have exported (and can rescan the exported folder if you export with different Mac than you started with).

It uses Apple's PhotoKit API (same as Photos app), so it doesn't need any other permissions than access to photos.

The app is fully open source, MIT licensed. You can download it free from Github Releases page or support the development (Apple developer fee ~100$ per year) by buying the app from App Store. With App Store version you get automatic updates (provided by App Store), with Github version you need to download the new versions manually. The versions are identical.

Hopefully someone finds this tool useful! Feel free to open an issue on Github if you find a bug or would need some specific feature!

The project has a small website here: Photo Export — Free Mac App to Back Up iCloud & Apple Photos

App Store: Download on the Mac App Store

Github Releases: Download from GitHub (free)

I mean honestly?!

We are 50+ years after sending people to space, we are modifying genetic information of plants and animals, but you can't turn a Photos album into a shared album?!

Photos in shared albums are a low-res copy of your actual photos?!?!

In a shared library, the album structure does not replicate for all participants, what's more, those same albums also show up empty in my own personal library

Absolutely ridiculous

Rant over.

It’s really disappointing to see Photomator not getting any major updates since being acquired by Apple.
It could have become the best pro photo editing app for iPhone and Mac, especially if it was included in the Creator Studio subscription.
Instead, Apple seems to have forgotten about it, with it not even having the new Liquid Glass design language yet. I really hope I’m wrong and Apple has something major in the works.

I have an iPhone 15 256GB and I’m basically running out of storage. I don’t have any games or other huge apps — the majority of my storage is just photos and videos. I currently have around 29,000 photos/videos.

I already have a 1TB WD My Passport HDD, but I haven’t tried transferring my entire photo library to it yet.

For anyone with a similar setup, what would you recommend?

My current idea is:
- Transfer/archive my photos and videos to the 1TB WD My Passport
- Keep only recent/favorite photos on my iPhone
- Have another backup of the WD drive in case it fails
- Possibly use Google Photos as an additional cloud backup

Is Google Photos reliable for this, especially for keeping the original quality and metadata?
I’m also on Windows, so I’d appreciate recommendations for the easiest way to transfer and organize ~29K photos without messing up dates, Live Photos, metadata, etc.

I know keeping everything on just one HDD isn’t really a backup, so I’m trying to figure out a good long-term setup without paying a ton every month for cloud storage.

Would love to hear how you guys manage large iPhone photo libraries.

Is it possible to merge multiple photos into one? Similar to when taking a timed photo the camera takes a burst and combines all of them into one photo, I just want to condense my camera roll a little but I don’t want to delete my photos

Albums Backup is a simple, high-speed wired tool that helps you quickly back up your iPhone or iPad photos to your computer. You can transfer your entire Apple Photos library—Live Photos, videos, and iCloud originals — in full, uncompressed quality, preserving every detail metadata (capture time, location, handle edits made on files…)

You can even backup as your photos are organized(albums folders etc), automatically download iCloud originals, and keep everything organized exactly as it appears in Apple Photos!

After the full backup, you can also run incremental backups to transfer only new additions, and resume transfers if the connection is interrupted — making it ideal for large photo and video collections!!

Available on the App Store, with a full free trial:

• Subscription Version: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-backup-usb-to-pc-mac/id6670565009

• Lifetime Version for $7.99: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-backup-lifetime/id6752782889

Issue: When tapping a day, an album or a person, I want to see the actual photos instead of having the screen partially covered by a slideshow of select photos (as introduced in iOS / iPadOS 18).

Solution: Settings > Accessibility > Per-App Settings > Add App > Photos > Reduce Motion: On. This will make it so that the photos cover the entire screen instead of the slideshow.

Note: The same can be done in other apps where motion is used to direct attention; if not with "Reduce Motion: On", then with "Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions: On" and/or "Auto-Play Video Previews: Off". For example Apple TV's movie previews, Spotify's animated genre and playlist icons, and auto-playing videos while browsing Safari. I mention these examples on the side as they are distractions that took me time to find a solution to online.

I've been lurking here for a while seeing everyone's storage struggles and finally decided to tackle my own mess. Had 11,000+ photos and videos eating up storage and kept putting it off.

My situation

- iPhone 128GB, constantly getting "Storage Almost Full"

- Loads of random shitty videos from snapchat, drunk nights out.

- Tons of similar/duplicate photos from burst mode

- Random 4K videos from years ago taking 3GB each

- I've tried doing 'cleaning days' but it always just builds back up again.

What I tried

Built-in duplicate finder - found like 10 duplicates (lol)

Manual deletion - deleted like 200 photos, got overwhelmed, quit

What worked

Built an app with Claude Code that uses a swipe interface (like Tinder but for photos). It generates a TikTok style feed of my short videos too (absolute lifesaver). Sounds weird but it completely changed the psychology of it for me. You also build up a streak like Duolingo so I just do a bit on my commute each day.

I've released it on the App Store if you want to try it out - it's called Kage. The free tier builds if you get a streak but hopefully the paid tier isn't too expensive either - let me know!

Results

- Cleared 47GB in about across a few sessions

- Found 600+ duplicates I didn't know existed

- Deleted all those random screenshots

- Actually finished instead of giving up halfway

Claude Code built it ALL.

The swipe interface sounds gimmicky but it genuinely made it feel less like a chore. My brain went into "quick decision mode" instead of overthinking every photo.

Also has smart categories (screenshots, large files, duplicates) which helped me tackle the worst offenders first instead of random scrolling.

For anyone else avoiding this:

If you've been putting off cleaning your library because it feels overwhelming, try finding an app with a different interface. The swipe thing worked for me but everyone's different.

Main thing: pick something and actually start. Your future self (and your iPhone storage) will thank you.

Let me know if you try the app!

Hi everyone! I'm the developer of Pixea, a macOS image viewer that has grown into all-in-one photo viewing and editing app.

A couple of features:

• Browse folders. Not every single photo needs to be added to Photos library. If you're working on a side project and need quick edits, there's no need to go through adding images to Photos / editing / exporting / removing photos from library.

• More editing tools. Pixea offers depth-aware adjustments, spatial dehaze, point-to-click masking, curves, LUTs, color corrections, reshaping, upscale and more.

• A single workflow. Browse your images, make adjustments, and export the results without switching between multiple apps.

• Browse your Photos library in Pixea. Just drag and drop your .photolibrary file into Pixea. Currently, locally downloaded files supported.

Apple Photos is great for organizing and syncing a photo library. Pixea is an additional option for browsing and editing images, especially when you want more specialized editing tools.

I'd be interested to hear what Apple Photos users think, and what editing tools you wish were available in your current workflow.

Pixea is available on the App Store, with a free version covering a lot of adjustments. Or you can go Pixea Plus for depth-aware adjustments, LUTs and other pro tools.

https://apps.apple.com/app/pixea/id1507782672?ls=1