There is a lot to cover, but the title sums it up. I stopped keeping my photos in the cloud because of money and privacy reasons, but at the same time I couldn’t find a nice software that wasn’t a web app or an Electron web app that would run on iPhones and iPads, and would let me browse the library without headaches.
So I built Raza Photos. Completely written in modern Swift 6, requiring the latest Apple frameworks, needing at least macOS and iOS 26 (sorry), with no Internet connectivity, no telemetry, no phoning home, no ads, no subscriptions, no accounts.
You import the photo folders you want the Mac app. It safely indexes the metadata, leaves the photos exactly where they are, and uses Bonjour to advertise itself on your local network. You can start or stop the server if you want to use the app by yourself or publish the library to the whole family. When you open Raza Photos on any iPhone, iPad, or Mac in the house, it instantly discovers the server. If you have multiple Macs hosting libraries, it finds them all and shows a complete library, with deduplicated filters.
You can browse, filter by date, location, people, albums and events, and you can even edit metadata from iOS while on the couch. The changes can go back to the original files as XMP/EXIF, without touching the image pixels. You can add countries and cities to photos that have GPS data and you can browse them all on a map. Face detection is done locally on the device.
The app is free for now, but it will be a one time purchase of around 20 USD. In the future I plan to add photo transfer from iOS to the Mac server, so you can backup your photos or migrate them away from iCloud. I also plan more photo management features like date taken conflict resolution and better face detection. And I also plan to extract a Swift headless server for Linux which you could put on a NAS, but I am a just solo dev, so bug fixes and features will come at a slower pace. I also plan a video app and a music app with the same features.
Damn…I feel bad doing this but maybe you can cut your losses now and invest time in another project :/
Uh, is this closed source?
Open source?
Not open-source for now, sorry, but I do consider open-sourcing the networking layer one day though. I am very proud of it and I am sure it would help many projects. It’s an amazing peer to peer system with many helpers like broadcasting, managing connections, discovering peers and so on. But the whole app needs a lot of stabilization so definitely not ready to be slapped publicly on GitHub.
Sorry, not trustworthy with private data. Good luck though.
I totally agree with you and I know it was always going to be a long shot. For what it’s worth, the whole thing is local and you can see on all network reports there is no telemetry, no communication with any servers at any time. But I get it - this should not be your homework, nor yours to prove. Still. Maybe someone here will find it helpful.
