Iris
Iris is a native Mac photo library app for organizing, searching, and rediscovering photos and videos stored on your Mac, drives, or Photos library.
What is Iris?
Iris is a native macOS photo library app that helps people organize, search, and explore personal photo and video collections without moving originals into a cloud service. It is made by Retina Studio and is designed for users who want a private, desktop-based way to browse family archives, camera libraries, and Apple Photos collections. Iris can read from folders, external drives, and Apple Photos libraries, then build a fast local library for browsing people, places, dates, and other details. It includes views and tools for inspecting metadata, filtering large collections, rediscovering older images, and opening items in other Mac apps. The app is aimed at photo enthusiasts, family historians, and anyone maintaining a long-term media library on their own Mac.
Key features
- Browse photos and videos from folders, external drives, and Apple Photos libraries
- Search and filter your library by people, places, dates, orientation, and metadata
- View detailed photo information such as camera, lens, location, and file details
- Use local face recognition and content analysis to help organize large libraries
- Open, copy, and drag photos or videos into other Mac apps
- Rediscover older media with random browsing and on-this-day style exploration
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Safety overview
Status: Mostly safe
Iris is legitimate photo library software for macOS. Its normal job involves reading your photo and video libraries, metadata, and related media details so it can index and organize them. The app is designed to keep photo analysis and library data on your Mac, though the direct-download version can contact Retina Studio for license validation and update checks, and optional crash reporting or telemetry may be enabled in settings. Keep it if you use it for managing a local photo library, and review its privacy settings if you prefer to limit optional network sharing.
Recommendation: Keep Iris if you use it to manage or explore your photo collection. If you no longer need it, you can remove the app and its library data, but doing so will remove Iris’s local indexes, settings, and app-specific organization while leaving your original photos untouched.
Common paths
/Applications/Iris.app
Support paths
~/Library/Application Support/Iris
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/studio.retina.Iris.plist
Container paths
~/Library/Containers/Iris
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