I’m impressed by Iris, an elegant and clever Mac app that does a bunch of delightful things.

I have an array of photos sources: Two Photos libraries from different eras of Mac and pre-Mac computers; more than a decade of flat file storage that make up my Lightroom libraries; and a big file tree of imported mobile phone photos from prior to when I began syncing everything through iCloud Photos.

Until using Iris, these have been separate catalogs, technically unifiable by dumping absolutely everything into a single Photos library, but I really don’t want to do that. Iris gives me this nimble application layered over all those existing sources, so for the first time I have this entire digital photos history viewable in one place. It’s marvelous and transformative as a way to have access in a unified way to such a span of time and places.

Iris has a lot more to dig into, like entirely on-device machine learning to identify faces and associate them with named people. I can add people details and then Iris will show me things like photos from a person’s birthday over the years. I’m just scratching the surface but I’m really excited by what it can do.