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Technical scoring
Sharpness measured on the in-focus region, plus exposure, noise and motion blur, so a soft or blown frame never sneaks onto the shortlist.
For macOS · Local-first
Find any photo.
Keep only the best.
Phosview makes a huge photo library feel light. Search it in plain language, save those searches as collections, and cull a whole shoot down to your keepers in minutes. All on your Mac, with your originals untouched.
✦ Runs on your machine ✦ Originals never modified ✦ RAW · JPEG · HEIC · TIFF
100k+photos, instantly searchable
0photos uploaded by default
minutesto cull a full shoot
Find
Describe it. There it is.
Phosview understands what’s actually in your photos, so you can search the way you’d describe a memory. Type “a red car with a woman dancing behind it, somewhere in the mountains” and the frames that match rise to the top. No keywords to maintain, no folders to dig through.
Turn any search into a Smart Collection and it keeps itself current as you shoot. A library of a hundred thousand photos starts to feel like a tidy shelf, and every bit of it stays on your Mac.
Cull
A shoot’s worth of frames, sorted over coffee.
Every photo is tagged and scored the moment it lands: sharpness, exposure, faces, open eyes, the moment itself. Bursts collapse into a single group with the best frame already on top, so a twelve-shot sequence becomes one decision instead of twelve.
Then you fly through with the keyboard. Enter to keep, X to reject, C to clear. Thousands of photos become a clean shortlist in minutes, and your originals are never touched.
Tidy up
Already buried in photos? Point Phosview at the pile.
It works on the library you already have, not just today’s shoot. Phosview finds exact copies and near-duplicates, the almost-identical frames that quietly fill a drive, groups them together, and shows you the best of each so you can clear the rest in a single pass.
Nothing is deleted behind your back. You review, you decide, and your originals stay exactly where they are until you choose to remove them.
In the box
Everything a big library needs.
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Faces & eyes
Finds and groups the people in your library. Name someone once and Phosview proposes the rest across the whole set.
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Semantic search
Type what you remember, like “kid sliding into home” or “golden hour”, and the matching frames surface. No tagging required.
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Bursts & duplicates
Near-identical frames collapse into one group with the best shot on top, so a 12-frame burst becomes a single decision.
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Multi-axis ratings
Every photo carries independent scores, rolled into a 0–5 rating. Filter and sort on any axis, like “sharp shots, eyes open”.
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Publish to the web
Send a polished gallery of your picks to a private link. Set a title, and let people react, but only if you turn it on.
How it works
Four steps from card dump to keepers.
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01
Point it at a folder
Phosview indexes your originals and builds fast working previews by extracting the embedded JPEG from RAW, so it’s quick and lossless.
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02
Let it score
Every frame is rated on technical and semantic quality, all on your machine. (An optional cloud model for the trickier “meaningful moment” calls is on the way in a future release, opt-in and per batch.)
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03
Review the shortlist
Sweep through survivors with the keyboard: Enter to keep, X to reject, C to clear. Multi-select, batch, and the burst reviewer keep you moving.
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04
Export or publish
Send your keepers to a folder, or publish a private web gallery for the client or the family. Branded, titled, and yours.
Under the hood
A real engine, not a toy.
Phosview comes in two parts. There’s the native Mac app you click around in, and a separate engine process that does the heavy lifting: decoding RAW, scoring frames, recognising faces, building the search index. Keeping them apart is why the interface stays fluid while thousands of photos are analysed in the background.
It also sets up what’s next. In an upcoming release the engine will be able to run on a different machine from the app. Point Phosview at a box with more power for heavier AI passes, or more storage for very large libraries, and review from your laptop as if everything were local.
Pricing
Buy the app once. Publish only if you want to.
The app
$49one-time
Launch price $49 $39 · free updates within the version.
- The full culling engine: scoring, faces, search, bursts
- Runs entirely on your Mac
- Unlimited libraries & photos
- Also available on Setapp
Requires macOS 14 or later.
Publishing
Optional. For sharing galleries on the web.
Free$0
1 gallery · 50 photos · 30-day link · Phosview badge.
Creator$6/mo
25 galleries · 1,000 photos each · reactions · custom title.
Studio$15/mo
Unlimited galleries · 10k photos · password · custom subdomain · no badge.
Billed via the web. The app and publishing are separate.
Support
Questions, answered.
Does Phosview ever change my photos?
No. Originals are sacred. Phosview only reads them and keeps its own working cache and a sidecar database. Your rating decisions live alongside, never written back into your files unless you explicitly export.
Is my library uploaded to the cloud?
No. All scoring runs on your Mac, and the only time anything leaves it is when you choose to publish a gallery. An optional cloud AI pass is planned for a future release, and it will be opt-in and per-batch too.
What formats does it read?
RAW from all the common cameras (CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG and more), plus JPEG, HEIC, PNG and TIFF.
How does the one-time price work with updates?
Buy once and get every update within that major version free. When a major new version lands, it’s a separate purchase, so you only pay again if you want the leap.
Do I need the publishing subscription to use the app?
No. Culling, scoring, faces and search are all in the one-time app. The subscription only covers hosting galleries on the web for others to view.
Still stuck? We read every message.
support@phosview.app