An index to every photo you've ever taken.

Photo Atlas is a Mac app that reads your Apple Photos library and finds any picture by where it was taken, who's in it, the words in it, or simply what it shows. It runs entirely on your Mac.

Find a photo by

  • where it was takenLisbon, spring 2019
  • who's in itanyone Photos has a name for
  • the words in itgate B22
  • what it showsdog asleep on a blue sofa
  • album, date or camerapanoramas from 2016

Apple's on-device model writes a short description of every photo, so a plain search finds pictures nobody ever tagged.

Duplicates, sorted three ways

Identical copies
The same file, imported more than once.
Flagged by Photos
Pairs Apple Photos has already marked as duplicates.
Look-alikes
Bursts and near-repeats, matched by what they show.

Choose the one to keep and mark the rest. Before a photo goes to Recently Deleted, Photo Atlas copies its original to your backup drive and puts the kept photo in the same albums.

Stays on your Mac

Your photos are never uploaded. Search, text recognition and descriptions come from models that run on your Mac: Apple Vision, Apple's on-device model and MobileCLIP. Photo Atlas reads your library without changing it. The only exception is a deletion you've reviewed and confirmed.

Download

Photo Atlas is a personal app for macOS 27. Enter the site password to get the installer. Once installed, it keeps itself up to date and asks before each update.