Your photos, your folders,
your Mac.
A fast, local-first photo browser for macOS. The Apple Photos feel — over your own folders and backup drives. No library lock-in, no cloud.
⬇︎ Download for Mac Free · ALPHA · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
Why FotoBrowser?
Apple Photos keeps everything inside a single .photoslibrary bundle. Move it the wrong way or point it at an external drive and it can break — and then your realistic option is to buy more expensive Apple storage to keep things "safe." Your photos are effectively held hostage by the app.
FotoBrowser does the opposite. Your photos stay as ordinary files in ordinary folders on whatever drives you like. You get an Apple-Photos-style timeline, built around how people actually back up — working disks, master drives, and read-only vaults.
What you get
🖼 Fast timeline
Month/year sections, lazy thumbnails, smooth on tens of thousands of photos.
🗂 Your folders
Watch any folders on any drives. Files are never moved without you.
💾 Drive roles
Internal, Master, and read-only Vault drives that are never modified.
🔌 Offline-aware
Disconnected drives show placeholders; full-res from a connected copy when available.
📱 Import from iPhone
Copy-only over USB, with a smart “new since last import” date.
🧬 Duplicates
Detected by content across all folders, with safe bulk resolve and Reclaim Space.
❤️ Albums, Likes, Crop
Plus native printing — photo sizes, tiling, date stamp.
🔒 100% local
No cloud, no account, no telemetry. Your photos never leave your Mac.
Install
- Download the
.dmg, open it, and drag FotoBrowser to Applications. - The alpha isn't notarized yet, so on first launch right-click the app ▸ Open ▸ Open (only needed once), or run
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/FotoBrowser.app. - Add a folder of photos (the ＋ in the sidebar) and you're off.