Phoaly is a photo organizer for people who never wanted a photo library. It does not import, copy, or upload anything. It reads the folders you already keep, builds a disposable index beside them, and stays out of the way.
This guide covers the first session — installing the app, adding folders, browsing, culling, and organizing — plus the details that matter later, such as disconnected drives and what happens when the trial ends.
What Phoaly is, and what it is not
Phoaly is a browser and organizer for folders that already exist on your Mac. It is not a cloud service, and it does not maintain a separate photo library. It is also not a RAW developer or a color editor: the work it is built for is finding, sorting, culling, renaming, moving, and cleaning up.
Because there is no import step, there is nothing to migrate. Point the app at a folder and your existing structure becomes the library.
Before you start
- macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon.
- About 290 MB for the app; the index and thumbnails add more, depending on library size.
- A backup. Phoaly is careful, but culling and organizing can move files and send them to the Trash. A current backup is the only real safety net.
Supported formats include JPEG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, WebP, BMP, and common RAW files (DNG, NEF, CR3, ARW, CR2, and others). Video uses system decoding for playback and covers, including Live Photo stills and motion clips. Rotate and crop write-back is limited to JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.
1. Install and start the trial
Download the DMG, open it, and drag Phoaly into Applications. The 30-day trial includes every feature and needs no account or card.
When the trial ends, the app becomes read-only: you can still browse and export, but not organize, edit, or cull. Your originals and index are untouched. Activating a license restores the full feature set.
2. Point Phoaly at your folders
Open the sidebar and add one or more folders. The tree mirrors Finder, including empty folders. Scanning and previewing are read-only.
The index is disposable. If it looks stale after moving files outside the app, rebuild it; nothing in your folders changes. Virtual lists, cursor pagination, and thumbnails that decode only in the viewport keep a 100,000-item library browsable.
If a drive disconnects, its place in the sidebar is kept. Reconnect it at the same mount point and the folder recovers — which is why stable mount points are worth the trouble.
3. Learn the four views
The same library has four ways to look at it:
- Grid — the overview, grouped by day.
- List — file details, for names, sizes, and dates.
- Gallery — one large frame with a filmstrip below; arrow keys keep you moving.
- Map — place clusters and photo footprints, with an offline fallback.
Sorting and grouping are independent. You can sort by capture time and group by folder, date, place, or camera. That one idea covers most of the ways people actually look for a photo.
4. Find a specific photo
Search is built in. It uses an FTS5 trigram index, so Chinese substrings and fragments from the middle of English names both match. If you remember the place or camera but not the date, combine search with grouping.
5. Cull a shoot
Cull mode is built around three decisions: keep, maybe, and reject. Each has its own key. The cull bar shows progress and filters, and batch deletion lives in the same place.
Deletes go to the system Trash and can be undone. Nothing is permanently erased from inside Phoaly, and browsing, scanning, and previewing never write to your originals.
A practical rhythm: cull once for the obvious rejects, switch the filter to "maybe", and decide those in a second pass. Two passes are usually faster than one careful one.
6. Organize with a preview
The organize workbench follows one sequence: plan, preview, confirm, journal, undo.
Build a year / month / day target, inspect the full preview, then confirm. Name conflicts get a suffix, copies are verified with sha256, and the whole session can be undone from its journal. Move, copy, and rename share the same engine. A cross-volume move copies, verifies, then sends the source to the Trash.
Start with a single folder or one shoot. Preview exists so you can see the result before anything changes; use it.
7. Activate when you are ready
Buy a license from the website. Checkout is handled by Stripe and does not require an account; the key arrives by email. A license covers one or two Macs, depending on the tier. To move to a new Mac, release the old device in the license portal, then activate the new one.
After activation, Phoaly works fully offline. The only optional network request is map tiles; turn the map off or stay offline and everything else keeps working. License validation runs on startup and periodically, and sends only the key, a random device identifier, and the app version.
A first-week checklist
- Add one folder, not every drive at once.
- Browse in all four views before deciding which one you will live in.
- Cull a single shoot with two passes.
- Run one organize plan on a small folder and undo it, just to see the journal work.
- Keep mount points stable so disconnected drives recover.
Where to go next
The changelog lists what changed, the roadmap shows what is next, and contact reaches us directly. If something in this guide does not match what you see in the app, tell us — the guide should follow the product, not the other way around.