Anthora

Anthora indexes photo and video folders on your Mac, external drives, or mounted network shares and turns them into a searchable library without moving originals or uploading anything. You can search filenames, visible text, people, dates, favorites, types, and detected subjects, and work through cleanup queues for duplicates, screenshots, low-quality captures, accidental videos, and unreadable files. Removals stay recoverable for 30 days, and matches and quality signals are presented as suggestions you confirm yourself.

The free edition is the full app capped at 500 items; the $29 lifetime license removes the cap, enables cleanup actions and Recently Deleted, and covers up to two Macs. It requires an Apple silicon Mac (M1 or newer) on macOS 14 or later. Notable limits: it does not read a Photos.app library directly, cloud-only placeholders must be downloaded first, the direct download is not notarized by Apple (a one-time macOS Open confirmation is needed, without disabling Gatekeeper), and semantic language search, best-shot grouping, and crop-aware matching are not in version 1.0.0. Activation contacts Lemon Squeezy with the key and an anonymous device name; normal use is offline afterwards. The purchase covers the current app and self-service docs — no setup help, consultations, response times, or guaranteed future updates.

Why no subscription? One $29 payment instead of a recurring cloud plan: no account, no media upload, no advertising, analytics, or telemetry. Your media, thumbnails, searches, and review decisions stay on your own Mac, and the free tier lets you test it on your real library first.