Lightbrary

a browser for your own photo archive

An archive nobody ever walks through is not an archive. It is a backup of something that stopped existing the moment it was saved.

Lightbrary is a tool for going through your photo library again and again: finding, comparing, rating and deleting. Not a catalogue, not a tagger. It works on the photo library already on your Mac and iPhone, and it reads what the system has quietly measured about every picture — sharpness, exposure, closed eyes, screenshots — and turns those into ways of cutting across the archive.

Download for macOS Free · macOS 14 or later · 2.4 MB · notarised

Lightbrary on macOS: the measures panel on the left lists system scores with a count beside each one, and the grid shows the photos that match. — Every measure the system computed, with the number of photos it would give you.

What it does

One working set. Filters decide what is in it, order decides what “next” means, and every view agrees.
Counts before you choose. Every condition says how many photos it would give you, before you click it.
Rating on a single continuous scale. No flags, no colour labels.
Side-by-side comparison and a pairwise tournament for near-identical frames.
1:1 preview, because that is the only place sharpness can be judged.

Everything stays on your devices

There is no account, no server and no analytics. Photos never leave your Mac or iPhone. Syncing between your own devices happens through a single file in a folder you choose — usually iCloud Drive, but any folder works.