Features

Hokusai PhotoVault is a familiar Apple-Photos-shaped app with one big difference: every photo, every album, every edit lives on the disk you own. No cloud upload, no account, no telemetry — just a calm, woodblock-quiet library that scales from a few thousand snaps to a serious archive.

Years → Months → All Photos

A familiar zoom of time. The ± 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 utility views surface duplicates, receipts, handwriting, illustrations, and the people inside it all — without ever leaving your machine. Twelve views in total, computed locally from EXIF, perceptual hashes, and on-device classifiers.

Map view

Every geotagged shot drops onto an honest world map — pan, cluster, drop into any pin. Click a marker to scrub through every photo from that place.

Edit, non-destructively

Eight curated filters, plus brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, rotate, and flip — all written through Sharp with an atomic temp-file rename so you never lose an original to a crashed write.

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.

Sync without surrender

Optional bridges to Google Photos (OAuth 2.0 with PKCE) and Apple Photos (macOS only, via osxphotos + AppleScript). Download-only, upload-only, or bidirectional — you stay the source of truth.

Open formats, all the way down

Photos sit on disk in their original container (HEIC, JPEG, RAW, PNG, GIF, HEVC video). Metadata is two flat JSON files. Move the folder, the library moves with it. Delete the app and your photos are still there.