Iris
Oh this is a magnificent new piece of software from Retina Studio.
Apple Photos is just about the only Apple supplied “application” that I regularly use on macOS and it’s… fine. Certainly no better than fine. Iris is exactly, precisely, what I’ve always wanted Apple Photos to be.
It took me 10 minutes of use to decide to move my photos from Photos to Iris. Yes Iris plays nicely with an existing Photos library, but nah I’ve actually moved everything out of Photos into the filesystem and into Iris exclusively.
The decision would only have taken 5 minutes but for this: I’ve got decades of titles attached to stuff in my Photos library, as in, captions/titles that I have manually typed in. I thought about it and I’ve almost never gotten any value from that effort, so sod it, titles/captions no more. Between dates, times, locations, face matching, and the delightful machine-learning-powered tagging that Iris does, I don’t need titles.
Some other charming features about Iris: it tells you what it’s doing. On first run it actually opens it’s little status window so you know what is going on. And if you wants to know more the documentation tells you. Imagine that! And the “Surprise Me!” menu option is so obvious and I frickin’ love it.
And it costs the price of two coffees. No subscription. I’d have paid 5 times that, no questions asked.
This is how software should be made.