Iris continues to move me with its “On this Day” feature. Now that my multiple decades of different catalogs are accessible in one place, I have this photo roll of personal history that changes every day. I find myself struck by the passage of time, recalling moments that I haven’t thought of for twenty years or more — and plenty of more recent memories, too. Every day I’m surprised and sometimes have to outright catch my breath. It’s quite a thing.

I got out for a paddleboard session early one morning this week. The water was perfectly calm and the air was hazy from wildfires, but had improved some from the day before.

Iris does some really nice things for unifying catalogs, but IMO this key feature is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself.

Alternative photo apps haven’t really stuck for me, but I am really appreciating a lot of what No Fusion does, so far. The interface feels pretty good, allowing for fairly natural feeling adjustments, and it has a nice set of film-like modes. It also claims to have a unique processing pipeline that improves detail and color. Does it? I don’t know; I’m not making direct comparisons, yet, but I do like what I’m getting from it. It feels deliberate enough and produces good enough output that it scratches a little of the same itch as using a bigger camera like my Fuji.

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.

Sunday morning selfie.

I got out to ride the 2 Line to downtown today, where I had a croissant and a cappuccino at the beautiful Boon Boona cafe that sits above the waterfront. What a beautiful spring day!

There are some casual clubs in town that organize periodic group ferry rides – what a treat! Taking photos with other people who dig ferries! They look like fun and I’d like to join sometime. And it reminds me of the time I got severely scolded by a ferry crew for taking too many photos. Times have changed.

This small corner shop would become the place where I got the most delicious and satisfying meal of my trip — a luxurious katsu curry.

The MacOS Journal app feels so half-baked. I thought I’d try it for a travelogue of my past week, dragged some photos to it, and it just dumps them in a pile. There’s no arranging, scaling for layout of landscape and portrait, nothing. C’mon, Apple, I’m trying to not shell out for Day One again, here.