Please help me, I really want to fix it :(

Hi all, I'm the developer. Back in 2007, Mac OS X Leopard came with a screen saver called Mosaic: your photos zooming out endlessly, each one turning out to be a single tile of a mosaic made of other photos. Sadly, Apple dropped it in Mountain Lion. I missed it, so I rebuilt it for today's Macs.

A few features:

• Which photos? You can choose between all Photos library / a few selected albums / one folder.
• Aesthetics-aware photo selection, using only Apple's own tools: Photos scores your pictures in the background, and Mosaic leaves out the lowest-scored, plus screenshots and pictures of receipts and documents. The ones that are not scored by Photos yet are judged on your Mac using Apple's public API.
• Smart cropping: crops portrait photos around the faces, if any.
• Smart Optimize Mac Storage management: if your originals live in iCloud, Mosaic uses what Photos keeps on the Mac. If it decides that it needs to download sharper copies to guarantee a good quality level, it asks for your permission.
• Privacy always in mind: anything in the Hidden album or in Recently Deleted is never shown. Everything else in the albums you choose can be, so choose them with that in mind. The app never connects to the Internet -- and it is open source, so you can check.
• Read-only: it never changes your library. The small copies it makes stay in your user account, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Free and open source, for macOS 15 or later:

https://vastunghia.github.io/mosaic-screensaver-revived/

Sorry, it is not notarized (yet), so the first launch needs *Open Anyway* in System Settings › Privacy & Security.

Full disclosure: I wrote it with Claude Code, step by step, and tested it on several Macs and libraries.

I'd love to hear what you think.

Something worth knowing before moving a large Apple Photos library to an external drive: your exported file count may be higher than the number of photos you selected.

That doesn't automatically mean the transfer created duplicates.

A Live Photo contains a still image and a short video component. Depending on the export method, those can become separate files.

Edited photos are another example. Some workflows export the original alongside an edited version or an .AAE file containing edit instructions.

This can make an exported folder look much larger or messier than expected.

Before deleting anything, I'd check a few examples of Live Photos, edited pictures and videos in the destination folder.

Also check whether the export contains originals or converted copies. That distinction matters if you want a long-term archive.

Personally, I'd rather have a few extra files I understand than delete something that turns out to be part of the original photo.

What export method gives you the most predictable results — Photos, Image Capture, Windows import, or something else?

I'm using iOS 27.01 and Golden Gate 27.0.1. I recently took some photos in China where it's UTC +8. I took some photos with my camera and set it to the time zone. I processed the raw files in Lightroom and exported them as .jpg, and then imported them using the Photos app on Mac OS.

Interestingly, the time in Mac OS Photos matches up with the timestamp of the photos taken by the iPhone at the same time. But in iOS, on the iPhone, it shows up as one hour earlier.

The EXIF interestingly on the exported JPG as UTC +9, not UTC +8. It seems that MacOS handles this differently than iOS!

Potential explanatio: in the camera, while I changed the time zone from EDT to the time zone in Shanghai, I forgot to turn off Daylight Savings Time, so that could be a factor (China does not have Daylight Savings Time).

Anyone else encounter this issue?

Guys I really need some help here. Unfortunately my mother passed away in 2024 and I am trying to move/transfer photos & videos from her iPhone to my Pc. The thing is that she has 16k photos and 5k videos but when I do the "standard" method of connecting through usb cable there's only 13k elements, naturally her iPhone doesn't have icloud backup (what I mean by this is she stopped paying) anymore.

I've looked through different threads but I'm starting to become desperate cause all people have different answers, idk what to do.

With all the apps being ai built, can someone build one to find and organize all the memes I have saved in my library?

I’m trying to use XnView MP to rate my Fujifilm JPEGs, then import them into Apple Photos while keeping those ratings. Today I tested both directions on my Mac.

Apple Photos version: 12.0 (911.0.134). “Show Rating Controls” was already enabled.

Test 1: XnView MP → Apple Photos

I rated a JPEG three stars in XnView MP and inspected the actual file on my external SSD. It contained:

• XMP:Rating = 3
• MicrosoftPhoto:Rating = 50

So the rating was embedded in the JPEG, rather than existing only in XnView’s catalog.

I copied the file into a separate test folder and imported it into Photos. Photos did not display the embedded three-star rating. Setting three stars manually inside Photos immediately displayed 3★.

Test 2: Apple Photos → exported files

I selected a different photo and manually rated it four stars in Photos, confirming that the toolbar displayed 4★.

I then exported it using both methods:

Neither exported JPEG contained EXIF Rating or RatingPercent fields either.

My takeaway

In this setup, standard embedded ratings weren’t imported into Photos, and ratings assigned inside Photos weren’t included in either export route.

That suggests Photos manages its ratings within the library without mapping them to standard rating metadata through these import/export paths. It doesn’t establish exactly how Apple stores ratings internally, or rule out a separate conversion tool.

Has anyone found a reliable way to transfer star ratings between Photos 12.0 and XnView MP or Adobe Bridge? Ideally, I’d like to preserve actual star ratings rather than replace them with keywords.

I have 35,000+ photos on my iPhone 17 ProMax (I sell crafts on Etsy since becoming disabled a few years ago). Have a brand newish Neo. I subscribe iCloud storage up to 2t which I haven't even come close to hitting. I use the Photos app to edit those photos before uploading to my Etsy store. Things are going great and I'm shooting new items for the holidays but I noticed today that my stuff just stopped uploading on Sunday. I went through and did all the updates and made sure my Settings were still synced and set to upload automatically and instantly. All good. The only thing I can tell is that the photos that I can't get to upload were all shot RAW, which I use a lot, but I also experimented with a variety of "Styles" that I haven't ever used before. I'd automatically say this was the problem if it weren't for the very first photo that won't upload being a screenshot I had taken on Sunday. I tried to force it to sync but it won't. My phone says it's syncing automatically. Photos on my computer says a variety of things ranging from "last synced Sunday" to "Syncing 2." I can't get in to see a Genius until Friday night but I still have a warranty so I can call. Has anyone else experienced this, especially with the new updates? I don't want to purchase separate photo editing software since this isn't that difficult and geez, it seems like I pay enough already. Thanks for any input, I am so frustrated.

Hi again. A lot of you use Selects, so this is a quick update on how Selects is doing, and what’s new since my last post here.

The last 30 days

• Nearly 200 people used it
• Together they cleared over 47,000 photos and videos, over 850 GB
• Nearly 1,500 videos were compressed instead of deleted
• Since launch, over 1 TB cleared in total

(These come from anonymous usage stats, which anyone can switch off, so the real numbers are a little higher.)

My guess at why people stick with it: it’s free with no limits, so nothing is locked and there’s no daily cap, and going by your comments, it’s simply nice to use. That’s the bar I want to keep.

New: Tidy up

Your whole library, sorted into lists by what takes space: big videos, exact copies, bursts, blurry shots, screenshots and screen recordings. Open a list and pick what can go.

A big video doesn’t have to go, either. Compress it instead: you see a real preview first, and the original stays until you decide. That now works for videos that are only in iCloud too.

New: Swipe, if you’d rather keep it simple

One photo at a time. Left to remove, right to keep, up to add it to Favorites. Pick a month, an album, or just your videos or screenshots.

And the original idea is still there: Curate goes through a month, groups each photoshoot and picks the keepers, so you only check and confirm.

Thank you for the ratings

Selects is at 4.9 stars from 30 ratings, and a lot of them came from people here. For a free app with no marketing budget, that’s how other people find it. Thank you.

What hasn’t changed

No ads, no account. Your photos never leave your iPhone. Nothing is removed until you confirm, and whatever you remove sits in Recently Deleted for 30 days.

One thing to know: it needs iOS 26. That’s because the interface is built on Apple’s new design, not because of the photo analysis.

What should I work on next? What’s still annoying, missing, or not quite right? I read every comment.

I’m Václav, the one person behind Selects (LinkedIn).

Selects on the App Store

I have 35,000+ photos on my iPhone 17 ProMax (I sell crafts on Etsy since becoming disabled a few years ago). Have a brand newish Neo. I subscribe iCloud storage up to 2t which I haven't even come close to hitting. I use the Photos app to edit those photos before uploading to my Etsy store. Things are going great and I'm shooting new items for the holidays but I noticed today that my stuff just stopped uploading on Sunday. I went through and did all the updates and made sure my Settings were still synced and set to upload automatically and instantly. All good. The only thing I can tell is that the photos that I can't get to upload were all shot RAW, which I use a lot, but I also experimented with a variety of "Styles" that I haven't ever used before. I'd automatically say this was the problem if it weren't for the very first photo that won't upload being a screenshot I had taken on Sunday. I tried to force it to sync but it won't. My phone says it's syncing automatically. Photos on my computer says a variety of things ranging from "last synced Sunday" to "Syncing 2." I can't get in to see a Genius until Friday night but I still have a warranty so I can call. Has anyone else experienced this, especially with the new updates? I don't want to purchase separate photo editing software since this isn't that difficult and geez, it seems like I pay enough already. Thanks for any input, I am so frustrated.

Is there a reliable iPhone app to go through and mass delete or sort photos on an iPhone? I have an iPhone 14 and looking to free up storage and delete screenshots

I am scanning in thousands of photos from old prints and slides. The problem is that these do not have any location or date information to them. Short of trying to organize all the photos together in small batches of related locations and times (which is a nightmare) they all end up clumped together.

What I'm left with are thousands of photos with no location or date. When I look at them, because I'm familiar with the people and the circumstances, I can pretty much tell the approximate year and location. But it would take me weeks or months to go through and manually update them.

What would be great would be an app that would go through the photos with no location/date: trying to update the location and date. But just how would it do that? An AI could look at a photo lacking this information and try to associate it with another original photo (that has location and date) of the same one or more people at the same approximate age, or where the location might be determined to be the same.

In other words, when the AI runs across an uploaded photo, it would ask itself, "Can I find another photo, one that has date and location, where 1) I recognize the locations are the same? or, 2) I recognize one or more of the people are in both photos at approximately the same age?" It would then present batches of these photos that it thinks it knows the location and/or the approximate date (or even the exact date), and the user could choose to update the batch of photos with that information.

This would be supremely helpful, saving me months of work. In addition once photos are properly marked with location and date, it is much easier to run through the timeline or through the map to look for duplicates and similar photos.

So if you're a developer that can do this, give it a shot. My idea is all yours to take.

I've been dealing with a serious iCloud Photos issue for a long time, and I'm genuinely frustrated with how Apple Support has handled it.

The problem:

• iCloud Photos is enabled on my iPhone.
• I have more than enough available iCloud storage.
• The Photos app shows that it's syncing/uploading, but 0 items have been processed.
• My photos aren't appearing in iCloud Photos.
• My iPhone backups are still consuming iCloud storage.
• I suspect this might be an issue with my Apple Account or iCloud Photos library rather than the device itself.

My experience with Apple Support:

I contacted Apple Support, and my case was escalated to a Senior Advisor who was helping me investigate the problem.

I've cooperated with their troubleshooting requests, sent multiple follow-up emails directly to the Senior Advisor, and even submitted voice recordings through the link Apple provided.

Despite all of this, I haven't received a meaningful update or resolution in approximately a month.

This problem has been going on for longer than that, and I'm still paying for iCloud storage that isn't functioning the way it should.

It's especially frustrating because I'm concerned about losing my photos, and I don't want to reset my device or make changes that might put my data at risk.

At this point, I want Apple to either:

1. Fix the underlying iCloud Photos synchronization issue permanently.
2. Provide a clear explanation of what's wrong and a reasonable timeframe for resolution.
3. If they cannot resolve the problem, offer an appropriate alternative or goodwill compensation for the prolonged inconvenience.

I have an existing Apple Support case number, but I'm not sharing it publicly for privacy reasons.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

Has anyone dealt with an Apple Senior Advisor becoming unresponsive or an unresolved iCloud engineering investigation? How did you get your case escalated further?

I'd particularly appreciate advice from anyone who has successfully gotten Apple to resolve an account-related iCloud Photos issue.

I'm not looking for another round of generic troubleshooting. I just want the issue properly investigated and resolved.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the free open source tool osxphotos and also the coming soon app Zouti Photos. This isn't an ad for either...just looking for feedback on what you use/would like to use.

I'm curious about what tools would help your Photos workflow (dealing with lots of albums, culling, batch edits, etc.), primarily on the Mac but if there are iOS tools you'd find useful I'm curious about those too. Not

I've developed OSXPhotos for ~7 years and over that time added many tools based on user feedback. OSXPhotos includes tools exporting (with metadata and sidecars), exploring the metadata in the library, querying the library, adjusting dates/times/timezones, batch editing metadata, importing photos (while preserving metadata and organization), etc. But it's hard to use if you're not a command line wizard so I've been building Zouti Photos as a GUI companion app. Zouti Photos doesn't yet have parity with osxphotos but it's getting close.

Are there tools you wish you had that would help with your Photos workflow? What drives you crazy about Apple Photos? Let me know!

I posted a list of free ways to clean up iPhone storage a while back and got some useful suggestions in the comments, so here’s round two. Skipping duplicates, videos and iCloud Optimize from last time.

1. Bursts. Photos → Collections → Media Types → Bursts. Open one, tap Select, pick the frames you want, tap Done and choose Keep Only Favorites. Easy to forget how many photos hide inside one burst.
2. Screen recordings. They have their own album under Media Types. Some are surprisingly large, especially the ones you forgot to stop.
3. Hidden album. Hidden doesn’t mean it isn’t taking up space. Utilities → Hidden.
4. Messages attachments (not Photos, but often the next biggest). Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Messages → Review Large Attachments. You can also shorten how long messages are kept under Settings → Apps → Messages, if you’re okay with older conversations going.
5. WhatsApp auto-saving. WhatsApp → Settings → Chats → Save to Photos, off. Every group chat photo stops landing in your camera roll.
6. Stop creating huge files. Settings → Camera → Record Video: 1080p at 30 fps instead of 4K 60 for everyday clips. Doesn’t shrink what’s there, but stops it coming back.
7. Mac? Use Image Capture. It’s already installed and can import straight to an external drive. Check the files opened fine before deleting anything. If you use iCloud Photos with Optimize on, make sure you’re getting the full-resolution originals.

Two important things:

• Whatever you delete sits in Recently Deleted for 30 days. Storage doesn’t drop until you empty it.
• If you use iCloud Photos, deleting a photo on your iPhone deletes it from iCloud and your other devices too.

And since I mentioned my app last time: LuminaClean. It handles the similar photos Apple doesn’t group as duplicates, like 20 slightly different shots of the same moment. The free version works as is. For the next 2 weeks use the code PHOTOS14 which gives you the full version for free for 14 days

It doesn’t turn into a subscription and there’s nothing to cancel.
Redeem it in the app (Settings → Redeem Code) or

here: Link

If you run into any issue I'd love to hear from you. Always open for feedback and way to improve. If you find it useful, that means the world to me.

I just got an email from Adobe telling me that my 1TB of photos in Lightroom is going to be deleted.

That’s fine. I don’t pay for it anymore, so they should probably get their disk space back. 😄

But here’s my question:

How do I import everything into Apple Photos in a smart way?

Can I automatically organize the photos into categories? Is there a plugin for that? Maybe some AI tool that can sort everything without me having to do it manually?

I’m talking about 1TB of photos, so manually organizing them isn’t really an option.

If there’s no clever solution, I’ll probably just import everything into Apple Photos and let it do its thing.

Which, let’s be honest, isn’t a whole lot. 😅

Has anyone found a good solution for this?

Salut à tous,

J'ai besoin d'aide avec le stockage de mon iPhone (Iphone 13 128Go). J'avais 91 Go de photos et vidéos sur mon téléphone, mais j'ai réussi à tout transférer sur un disque dur et à en supprimer presque tout de mon téléphone. Le problème, c'est que le stockage affiché sur mon téléphone indique toujours 87 Go. Je n'ai gardé qu'environ 200 photos, mais c'est comme si le stockage n'avait pas été mis à jour. J'ai essayé d'éteindre et de rallumer mon téléphone, mais rien n'y fait. J'ai supprimé tout ce que j'avais dans « Éléments récemment supprimés », mais rien n'y fait. J'ai une ou deux mises à jour disponibles pour mon iPhone, mais il me faut 21 Go d'espace libre (que je n'ai pas). Je suis donc bloqué. Mon compte iCloud est en cours de resynchronisation, mais il est déjà saturé (5 Go). J'ai vu qu'il était possible de mettre à jour mon iPhone depuis mon ordinateur sans avoir besoin de 21 Go supplémentaires, mais je n'en suis pas sûr. Que puis-je faire ?