Everyone you photograph, gathered.
Faces are recognised on your Mac. Name someone once and every photo of them is a click away.
A photo library for external drives · macOS
Your photo backup deserves better than Finder.
Pocket Album turns the folder of photos on your drive into a library you’ll want to open: sorted by date, gathered into trips and people, and updated the moment you add more.
Finder
Pocket Album
Drag to compare. Same folder, same files.
0files changed, moved or deleted. Ever.
0uploads, accounts or trackers.
1small folder added to your drive, so the library opens on any Mac.
20sto index 7,680 test photos on an M2 Mac.
01 — The library
One folder in.
A real library out.
No importing, no tagging, no setup wizard. Pocket Album reads what is already on the drive and gives it the shape a photo collection should have.
Every photo, in the order it happened.
Months and years instead of file names. Scroll through a decade in seconds, or jump straight to the year you’re after.
02 — The organising
It does the sorting,
so you don’t have to.
Add photos. They appear.
The folder is watched. Copy this month’s backup in and the library is current before you switch windows.
The library lives on the drive.
Plug the SSD into any Mac and carry on exactly where you left off.
A map of everywhere.
Photos stack up where they were taken and split apart as you zoom.
Whatever your camera saved.
Live Photos are reunited with their movie half. Lost dates are recovered from file names.
03 — Getting started
Three steps.
The third one is optional.
- 1
Choose your folder
Pick the folder on your drive, or drop it on the window. Every subfolder is included, however deep.
- 2
Let it read
Photos appear as they’re indexed, newest first. You can start browsing straight away.
- 3
Name a few faces
Trips sort themselves. People need one thing from you: a name, once.
04 — Trust
Built for the only copy
of your photos.
Read-only by design
Photos are opened for reading and nothing else. There is no code in the app that can rename, edit, move or delete them.
Offline by default
No account, no cloud, no analytics. The only request it ever makes is to Apple Maps, to turn coordinates into a place name.
No lock-in
Your folders stay exactly as you arranged them. Delete the app tomorrow and you still have a plain folder of photos.
05 — Questions
Before you download.
Is it really free?
Yes. There is no trial, no subscription and no account to create.
Does it work with an iCloud Photos export?
That is what it was built for. Export your originals, copy them to your drive in whatever folders you like, and point Pocket Album at the top one.
How long does the first scan take?
A test library of 7,680 small photos indexed in about 20 seconds on an M2 Mac. Full-size iPhone photos take longer, and finding faces carries on quietly in the background. Each photo is only ever read once.
What does it write to my drive?
One hidden folder, .pocketalbum, inside the folder you chose. It holds the index, thumbnails and face groups, and is usually a percent or two of the size of your photos. Deleting it is always safe.
How accurate is the face grouping?
Clear faces group reliably. If one person ends up split in two, the app suggests the match and you confirm it with one click. Your corrections are never undone.
My drive is formatted for Windows. Will it work?
exFAT drives work fully. NTFS drives are read-only on a Mac, so the index is kept on your Mac instead and doesn’t travel with the drive.
