On the topic of photo management, developer Tyler Hall is working1 on a Iris, a macOS photo management tool (‘the culmination of over a decade’s worth of thinking and experimenting’) with a great philosophy of power and privacy:

Iris is for people who care about their photos and videos and believe they’re worth safeguarding in a private, future-proof format that will outlive their grandchildren.

Iris is for family historians and archivists. As well as those who want a better, more robust, and dare I say nerdy way to manage an ever-growing photo and video library.

Iris is pragmatic and does not impose a certain workflow on you. Just point the app at your photo library on disk, and Iris will take it from there.

All sounds perfect for someone running their site on Hugo :-) Speaking of, the ability to export to a static site is a unique(?) and promising feature:

Iris can export a beautiful static website of your library, specific albums, or a custom search query. Then, just upload that to your own website.

Tyler’s blog is another marvel of well thought out posts that explain his (sometimes heated!) software frustrations and how he’s gone about solving them. He’s created a wealth of simple but elegant macOS utilities, often free, to enhance his workflows - the excellent looking TextBuddy being the most recent example.

He’s posted about his efforts to take control of his photo data in the past, and the quality of his existing work gives me high hopes for Iris. I don’t even own a Mac (waiting on the near-mythical 14" Mx Macbook) and I’m interested.

  1. Or at least I hope he’s working on - there have been no updates for a few months. He does call it his ‘white whale’, so I guess we should expect slow but steady progress! ↩︎