Why date folders fail
A folder called 2019_06_Portugal says nothing about the tram at dusk or the tiled facade. You open it, scroll 800 thumbnails, and still miss the shot. PhotoCore searches the content instead, so a short phrase brings it up.
Solution
Find any travel photo by place, date or description
You shoot on every trip, and years of travel photos now sit in folders spread across your Mac and a couple of external drives. Finding one shot from Lisbon means opening folders named by date until something looks familiar. PhotoCore gives you three ways in: type 'street market at night', see every geotagged shot as a pin on a map, or filter by a date range, and search keeps working when the drive is unplugged.
Describe the shotMap viewDate range filterOn device
How it works
Three ways to reach one photo
Describe it, map it, or date it
Sometimes you remember the scene. Sometimes you remember the city. Sometimes you only remember it was the trip in June. PhotoCore covers all three: semantic search reads the content of every image, the Map view places geotagged photos as pins, and the calendar filter narrows results to a date range. You can combine them, like 'market stall' limited to two weeks in May.
- Type what you remember, like 'street market at night'
- Browse your archive as pins on a map, built on Apple Maps
- Filter by a calendar date range, down to the exact days
Why it helps
Built for an archive that spans years and drives
See your trips on a map
The new Map view reads the GPS coordinates already in your photos' metadata and shows them as native pins on Apple Maps. Click a pin to open the photo. Everything runs on device.
Jump to a date range
The new calendar filter narrows any view to a date range. You know the trip was the last two weeks of May, so you set the range and browse only those days.
Works with the drive unplugged
PhotoCore indexes folders in place, read-only, and stores the search data locally in SQLite. It keeps finding photos on external drives and NAS shares after you disconnect them.
Good to know
The engine behind it
All three ways run on the same local foundation. Text search uses SigLIP 2 through Core ML on the Apple Neural Engine and answers in under 50ms across 10,000 images, in more than 100 languages. The full detail is on the AI photo search page. Nothing is uploaded, so the pins, the dates and the search results stay on your Mac.
Keep exploring
Related pages
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Do my photos need GPS data to appear on the map?
The Map view uses the GPS coordinates already stored in each photo's metadata. Photos without coordinates skip the map, and you can still find them by description or by date range.
Does the Map view upload my photos?
No. PhotoCore reads GPS coordinates on device and places pins with Apple MapKit. No photo leaves your Mac.
Can I search photos on a drive that is unplugged?
Yes. PhotoCore stores the embeddings locally in SQLite, so search keeps finding matches from unplugged external drives and NAS shares. Plug the drive back in to open the original file.
Which image formats does PhotoCore index?
JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, GIF and BMP. Folders are indexed in place and read-only, so there is no import step and your files are never moved.
Get started free
Find every trip you ever took
Download PhotoCore free and index up to 200 images to try search, the Map view and the date filter. Full access is a one-time purchase of 59.99 euro, or 29.99 euro Early Bird until July 15.