Fotohaus
Fotohaus sorts the folders you already have into a library you can search, edit and enjoy. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is moved.
Version 1.0.1 · free · Apple silicon, macOS 14 or newer
Or with Homebrew: brew install --cask aelnagish/tap/fotohaus
First launch: if macOS says Fotohaus “is damaged”, click Cancel, not Move to Trash. Here’s the one-line fix.
Double-click any photo in Finder and it opens straight away over your desktop. Press ← and → to move through the rest of the folder. There’s nothing to import first.
Type a name, a place, a year or what’s in the picture. Fotohaus recognises faces, objects, scenes and even the words in a photo, all on your Mac.
person:anna place:zermatt year:2019One-click fixes, fine tuning and more than 40 effects. Your original is always kept, so every change can be undone, even years later.
Each day Fotohaus gathers the pictures you took on today’s date in earlier years, ready to play as a slideshow. Every photo also knows where it was taken, worked out offline from a built-in atlas.
There’s no account and no cloud. Faces, search and editing all run on your Mac, and your photos stay in the folders you put them in.
Move pictures to Private and they disappear from the library, search and Memories. Opening it takes Touch ID or your Mac password.
Tuck away screenshots and receipts you want to keep but not see every day. They stay on disk and come back with one click.
Anything you delete waits 30 days before it goes to the Trash, so a slip of the finger is never final.
Point Fotohaus at your old Picasa folders and your stars, captions, albums, face tags and edits are all there. They’re read straight from the .picasa.ini files Picasa left behind, and Fotohaus keeps writing them, so nothing is locked in.
Reads JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, PNG, TIFF, WebP, GIF, PSD, camera RAW (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF and more) and common video formats. A command line, fotohaus-cli, and an MCP server let you search and organise from the Terminal or an AI assistant.
Fotohaus runs on Apple silicon Macs (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.
Nothing is wrong with Fotohaus. macOS says this about every app from the internet that Apple hasn’t notarized yet. It takes ten seconds to fix, once:
xattr -cr /Applications/Fotohaus.appIf macOS says it could not verify Fotohaus instead, open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. Installing with Homebrew skips this step entirely.
One command installs Fotohaus, opens it without the first-launch warning and adds fotohaus-cli to your Terminal.
brew install --cask aelnagish/tap/fotohausFotohaus-1.0.1-arm64.dmg (200 MB), or browse all releases.
Open the disk image and drag the app onto the Applications folder.
Fotohaus isn’t notarized by Apple yet, so macOS asks before the first launch. If it says the app is damaged, click Cancel and follow the steps above. If it says it could not verify Fotohaus, open System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
No. Face recognition, search, place names and editing all run on your Mac. There’s no account, no cloud and no tracking.
No. Fotohaus works on your folders where they are. Edits are stored alongside the photo and your original is kept, so you can always go back.
Yes. Fotohaus doesn’t touch the Photos library. Point it at any folders you like, including exports from Photos or Google Takeout.
Not at the moment. Fotohaus needs an Apple silicon Mac (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 or newer.
Yes. Fotohaus is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. You can use, study, share and change it.
Drag Fotohaus from Applications to the Trash. Your library data lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Fotohaus; delete that folder too if you want it gone completely. Your photos are never touched.
If it saved you an afternoon of sorting photos, you can buy me a coffee. Bug reports and ideas are welcome on GitHub.