A vault for the thirty-six views of your life.
Hokusai PhotoVault is a desktop app that keeps your photo library where it belongs — on your machine. The polish of a professional photo app, the soul of a woodblock print, and none of the cloud lock-in.
From Kyoto temples to Norwegian fjords.
Whatever you photograph — mountains at dawn, neon at midnight, a kettle on a stove — it lives here in full resolution, on your disk.
Designed in the shadow of a wave.
The familiar rhythm of a professional photo app — three-pane layout, frosted top bar, gallery on a calm grey field — refined with smarter utility views and a quiet, considered chrome.
Twelve utility views. Forty-plus icons.
One library you actually understand.
Every photo enters by the same gate, gets read for date, place and content, and joins a library you can sort by face, by place, by intent — or by what kind of thing it is.
Years → Months → All Photos
A familiar zoom of time. ± controls slide between seven density steps, from 80 px contact-sheet to 420 px wall-print. The grid breathes as you breathe.
People, places, things
Smart views surface duplicates, receipts, handwriting, illustrations — and the people inside it all.
Map view
Every geotagged shot drops onto an honest world map — pan, cluster, drop into any pin.
Edit, non-destructively
Eight curated filters, plus brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, rotate and flip — your original is always preserved.
Recently Deleted is a thirty-day verandah
Soft-delete drops a photo into a trash that ages out gracefully. Auto-purge after thirty days, restore at a click. No stranded files, no surprise gone-forevers.
Your photos, the way you took them. On the disk you own.
No upload, no tracking, no account. Originals live in a folder you choose, and the whole library moves with that folder. Delete the app and your photos are still there, exactly where you put them.
Sync with the clouds you already use — on your terms.
PhotoVault talks fluent Google Photos and your Mac's photo library, with download-only, two-way, or upload-only modes. You stay the source of truth.
Google Photos
Connect through your browser — you never paste a password. Sync runs every fifteen minutes, or only when you ask. Pause, reverse, or disconnect anytime.
Mac Photo Library
On Mac, PhotoVault talks directly to your built-in photo library — no cloud round-trip, no re-exporting, no fragile shared albums.
Free as in library card.
Pro as in sumi-e brush.
PhotoVault is free forever for everyday libraries. Pro unlocks every utility view, both cloud bridges, and the editor — for the price of a hardback.
Free
- Unlimited local photos
- Library, People, Favorites, Timeline
- Albums & soft-delete
- Import & EXIF intelligence
- Local-first — no account, no telemetry
Pro
- Everything in Free, plus —
- All twelve utility views (Duplicates, Receipts, Handwriting…)
- Google Photos & Mac Photo Library sync
- Full editor — 8 filters, color, geometry
- Cloud backup destination
- Priority email support
One-time · all future updates · 30-day refund.
Honest answers, no marketing fog.
PhotoVault/photos/YYYY-MM/ for originals and PhotoVault/thumbnails/ for 400×400 JPEGs. Two flat JSON files (photos.json, albums.json) hold the metadata. Move the folder, the library moves with it.editedAt is stamped in the metadata. We chose this over a sidecar/edit-stack model because it keeps the on-disk file the source of truth.Bring the vault home.
Free, no account, ~24 MB. Apple Silicon, Intel, Windows, Linux — pick your flavor.
Coming soon — pre-release