Name each person once
Pick a few clear shots of Mom, name her, and every photo of her across two decades becomes a search away. It works on scans saved as JPEG or TIFF too, so the shoebox years join the phone years. See face recognition.
Solution
Fifty thousand family photos, one search away
Your family archive holds 50,000 images: scans named Scan_001, phone shots named IMG_7890, two decades spread across the Mac and a few old drives. The anniversary album is due next month, and finding one picture of Dad with the grandkids means scrolling folders for whole evenings. PhotoCore indexes everything in place and finds people by face and scenes by description, entirely on your Mac, with no cloud and no account.
Search by nameWorks on scansTwo decades on a mapOn device
The album search
'Dad with the two grandkids', typed once
No tagging marathon first
Other tools ask you to label thousands of photos before search becomes useful. PhotoCore works the other way around: it indexes the archive as it is, and you combine a person with a people-count filter and a scene. Search for @Dad, set the filter to 'exactly 3 people', add 'in the garden', and the album candidates are on screen.
- Use @mentions in any search, like '@Dad at the lake'
- Filter by people count: 'exactly 3' for Dad plus the two grandkids
- Add a scene in plain words, like 'birthday cake' or 'garden'
How it works in detail: face recognition.
Why it helps
Built for an archive that holds a family
Two decades on a map
The Map view reads the GPS coordinates already in your photos and pins them on Apple Maps: the trips, the beach summers, the old house. Photos without GPS skip the map and stay findable by description or date. See the photo map.
Everything stays in the house
Face recognition runs on device with Apple Vision, and it is off by default until you decide to turn it on. No cloud, no account, no trackers: the most personal archive you own never leaves the Mac.
Delete face data anytime
Remove the face data for one person, for everyone, or for everything older than a date, in one click. The data only ever lived on your Mac, so deleting it there is the whole job. GDPR-friendly by design.
Good to know
Old drives count too
Family archives rarely live in one place: part sits on the Mac, part on the drive from the old computer, part on a backup disk in a drawer. PhotoCore indexes each folder in place, read-only, and keeps the search data in a local SQLite database. That means the 2009 drive stays searchable even when it is unplugged; you reconnect it only when you want to open or print the original. Search itself runs on SigLIP 2 through Core ML on the Apple Neural Engine and answers in under 50ms across 10,000 images, in more than 100 languages.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Are my children's photos safe with face recognition?
Yes. Faces are detected and matched entirely on your Mac, using Apple Vision on the Neural Engine. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and no face data ever leaves the device. Face recognition is also off by default, so nothing runs until you turn it on.
Does face recognition work on scanned photos?
Yes. Name a person once from a few clear shots and PhotoCore matches them across the archive, including scans saved as JPEG or TIFF. Pick sharp samples: very small or faded faces in old prints are harder to match.
Can I delete face data later?
Yes, in one click. Delete face data for a single person, for everyone, or for everything older than a date you choose. The data only ever existed on your Mac, so deleting it there removes it completely.
Do the old drives need to stay connected?
No. PhotoCore stores the search data locally in SQLite, so photos on external drives stay findable after you unplug them. Search as usual, then plug the drive back in when you want to open or print the original file.
Get started free
Finish the album before the deadline
Download PhotoCore free and index up to 200 images to try face search, the map and description search on your own archive. Full access is a one-time purchase of 59.99 euro, or 29.99 euro Early Bird until July 15.