Your photos.
Finally together.
All your photos. From all your drives. In one archive.
PhotoReunion is a Mac app that makes one archive out of all your drives and backups, each photo once. You decide what stays: ten minutes today, an evening next week, and you always go on right where you stopped.
Many drives. One archive.You decide what stays.
15 years of photos. 20 backups.
Where do you start?
Everything twice, or three times.
Phones, cameras, WhatsApp, old backups. The same photos on every drive, and nobody knows whether one is missing somewhere.
Christmas is filed in March.
Exports and scans carry the day they were copied, not the day they were taken.
Too much for one evening.
Nobody sorts 50,000 photos in one go. So it waits, year after year.
Find your photos.
Rediscover your memories.
Stop today. Go on next month.
Every collection is a project. Open it, review for a few minutes, close it again. In every stage a bookmark remembers the last picture you decided on. Next time you start there, not at the beginning. Your decisions stay in the project, however long the break.
See everything before anything moves.
Add all your drives, sticks and backups at once. Within a minute you see how many photos there are, from which years, in which formats, and a timeline with the gaps. Nothing is touched while you look.
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Search for what is in the picture
Apple's image recognition on your Mac tags what is in each photo and reads the text in it. Search finds these words, file and folder names and years, even on a drive that is not plugged in.
Drives back in the drawer
Bring a drive in once: its photos are copied, each one checked, to the drive your archive will be on. The drive itself is only read, and then it can go back in the drawer.
Doubles, blurry shots, series: you decide.
PhotoReunion finds exact and edited copies, series, blurry pictures and wrong dates, and proposes what to keep. One stage after the other, one group at a time, large. The arrow keys walk through, one key keeps a picture or sorts it out. Nothing moves before you said so.
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Doubles
Exact copies by content. Edited, resized and rotated copies by how they look, with a slider from strict to loose. Series from one camera, seconds apart.
Wrong dates
Camera date first, then the video header, the file name, the folder name, the date printed into the picture, the neighbours. Every proposal says where its date comes from and how sure it is.
Junk and blurry?
Screenshots, tiny cache files, failed shots, and a blurry stack with a slider. Suggestions with a question mark, never sorted out on their own.
Picture by picture
Everything that is in no stack comes one photo at a time, for a last look. In a hurry, the same photos as a grid.
Your own date
Where no file knows the day, type it in. Dates printed into the picture are read day first or month first, as you set it.
Large when it matters
One picture alone, as large as the window. Zoom into the same spot of every picture in a group to see which one is sharp.
Your trips in albums.
The app finds runs of days with clearly more photos than usual: a trip, a feast. Drag photos from a month onto an event, give it a name, and it becomes an album folder in its year. Everything else stays in its month.
Everything in one place. Each photo once.
Year and month, just the year, or year and month with albums for your events; videos get a folder of their own in each. Before the click, one bar shows the archive to be. Every file is copied and checked by content hash before the source is touched.
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Copy by default
The sources stay as they are. Moving is a choice, and even then only after the copy was verified.
Dates repaired
Confirmed dates are written into the archive copy: EXIF for JPEG and HEIC, file dates for everything.
A report
Counted, copied, verified, dates repaired, sorted out by reason, moved inside the archive. In the app and as a text file in the archive.
Add to an archive
New photos for an archive you already have. A photo that is in it byte for byte is not copied again; similar ones come to Doubles for you to decide.
Tidy an archive
The archive's own photos go through Review. What you sort out moves into Sorted out, a new date moves a photo to its month, a named event into its album. Nothing is copied.
Build again
Change your mind and build once more: the archive follows your decisions, and every photo is in it once.
Nothing is deleted. Ever.
- Sources are only read, and building copies by default. Tidying moves files inside the archive, never out of it.
- Every copy is verified by hash before the source is touched.
- Doubles and junk are moved, never deleted. The Sorted out folder holds them with a manifest until you empty it. Undo works until then.
- Before a new date goes into the only copy of a photo, the photo as it was waits in Sorted out, and undo puts it back.
- An archive is never rearranged on its own: only what you decided moves.
- The destination is never inside a source. Existing files are never overwritten.
- Everything runs on this Mac. No account, no cloud, no tracking, no model downloads.
I built PhotoReunion for myself. Over 15 years of photos, 20 backups with the same pictures in them, and no idea where to start. So I built an app where I can stop at any time and go on weeks later, right where I was.
Dietrich Gebert
Finally know that no photo is missing.
Get it on the Mac App StoreFormats, requirements and limits
What it does not do
- Edit pictures. It sorts, it does not change what is in them.
- Recognise people. Tags are objects, scenes and text, not faces.
- Touch Apple Photos or Lightroom libraries.
- Search inside videos.
- Sources
- Folders, external drives, USB sticks, network shares. Several at once. An unplugged drive stays in the catalog.
- Files
- JPEG, HEIC, PNG, GIF, WebP, TIFF, AVIF, the common RAW formats, MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, AVCHD, MPG, 3GP, MKV, WMV, WebM. Everything else is counted and left alone.
- Recognition
- On this Mac only, with Apple's built in frameworks. No account, no cloud, no upload.
- Requires
- macOS 15 or newer, Apple Silicon and Intel.