Release notes.

New Features

The first beta of Iris for iPhone and iPad is now available on TestFlight. It requires the latest version of Iris for macOS, with both devices connected to the same local Wi-Fi network.

The iOS app is still very much a beta and has plenty of rough edges, but I’d love feedback on the features, overall experience, and direction it’s heading. Join the TestFlight here.

Confirm Faces window. There’s now a dedicated window for confirming the faces Iris has suggested for each person (Window → Confirm Faces). Select someone, and Iris will show you a photo with their face highlighted. Is it the right person? Click Yes or No, or use the 1 and 2 keys for lightning-fast triaging. The more faces you confirm, the better Iris gets at recognizing the people in your library.

Open in Apple Photos. Items imported from Apple Photos now include a Photos option in the Open With menu. Choose it to reveal the original in your Photos library, even if that item is stored only in iCloud. For now, this feature supports only your primary Photos library.

Redesigned Insights charts. Charts in Insights are now interactive. Hover over a bar to see its exact count, or click it to browse the matching photos. It’s a quick way to jump straight to everything captured in a particular month, year, or time of day.

Last Seen. Iris now remembers which photos you’ve viewed. Opening an item in the inline viewer records a Last Seen date, which appears in the Metadata inspector and can be used for sorting and filtering. That makes it easy to resume a review where you left off, find photos you haven’t seen in a while, or work your way through a large library.

“Has Been Seen” filter. A companion to Last Seen that lets you quickly find photos you’ve already viewed — or ones you’ve never opened.

Create a location by address. When adding a new Location from the + menu in the sidebar or from the main menu, you can now search by address or place name and choose from the suggestions. It’s much faster — and more precise — than finding the spot manually on the map. (Thanks to CL)

Filter button in the toolbar. The filter editor now lives in a popover behind a dedicated Filter button in the toolbar, instead of being tucked away in a menu. It also has new Apply and Clear buttons that (finally) behave the way you’d expect.

Improvements

Faster imports. Importing new items into your library is now about 20% faster and uses less memory.

Better face suggestions. Iris is now much better at suggesting faces that might belong to a person. For the best results, add at least five confirmed faces so Iris has a good sample to learn from. You can speed things up even more with the new Confirm Faces window (Window → Confirm Faces).

Double-clicking a photo in the inline viewer now closes it, just like double-clicking opened it.

API Server improvements. For those testing the upcoming Iris iOS app, macOS will no longer throttle Iris while the API server is running. That means faster, more reliable responses from the companion app, even when Iris has been sitting in the background for a while. This does not prevent your Mac from going to sleep.

Search improvements. Searches containing apostrophes, commas, periods, hyphens, colons, parentheses, or question marks now work correctly. Previously, these characters could cause a search to return no results.

Improved MCP server. If you use Iris with Claude or another AI assistant, searches can now combine people, tags, date ranges, media types, and favorites in a single request. Iris also ranks matches by relevance and automatically broadens the search when an exact match would otherwise return nothing.

Bug Fixes

• My quest to hide menu icons on macOS Tahoe accidentally hid them from the Open With menu too — one of the places they’re actually useful. They’re back now.
• The close button in the inline photo and video viewers is now larger and lives in the top-left corner, where it no longer overlaps the video volume controls. (Thanks to AH)
• Fix a UI bug where the toolbar's search field had extra padding on the right side.
• Fixed thumbnails occasionally getting stuck partway through a large import.
• Fixed the Scanning Library screen getting stuck if you added a new source while Iris was still processing the library.
• Fixed an edge case where deleting a Source would fail to, you know, actually delete it.
• If the API server can’t start — for example, because the port is already in use — Iris now reports the error instead of pretending everything is fine.
• Fixed a brief flash of the map in the inspector’s Summary tab when selecting a photo with no location.

Other Things

• Sparkle’s update window now includes the release notes for any versions you’re skipping, not just the latest one. That way, you can catch up on changes you may have missed.
• These release notes have been redesigned to better match the Iris website and improve dark mode support.

New Features

On This Day — A new “On This Day” node in the sidebar, just below “No Date,” shows every photo and video taken on today’s month and day across all the years in your library. The window title tells you which day you’re looking at (for example, “On This Day: June 21”). (Thanks to Mike P)

People groups — People can now be organized into nested groups in the sidebar. Create, rename, and delete groups from the sidebar’s context menu, drag people and groups between them, and add a person or a subgroup straight from a group’s right-click menu. Selecting a group shows every photo of everyone in it, including people nested in subgroups. Great for creating families. (Thanks to z1i)

Copy an item to the clipboard — Right-click any photo or video in the grid or list view and choose “Copy” to put its image on the clipboard, ready to paste into another app. If the original file isn’t available, Iris copies the cached thumbnail instead; for videos, it copies the poster frame rather than the movie file. (Thanks to JJ)

Drag photos out of the inline viewer — Dragging an item to Finder or another app now works from the inline viewer, matching the behavior already available in the grid and list views. (Thanks to JJ)

Overlay person names onto dragged photos — A new preference (Settings → Special → “Overlay Names”) overlays the names of the people in a photo onto copies you drag out of Iris. Names are drawn as black text on a white background, listed in the corner of the image, and include each person’s age at the time the photo was taken when Iris knows their birthday. Your originals are never modified — only the dragged-out copy carries the labels. (Thanks to GP)

Sidebar expansion is remembered — Which sidebar sections you had expanded is now restored when you relaunch Iris. Because Iris can restore multiple windows and tabs, expansion state is saved per window rather than shared across all of them.

Improvements

• Right-clicking a person’s face in the inspector now opens a context menu with Edit, plus Confirm or Reject depending on whether that face has already been confirmed. (Thanks to Alan)
• The “Open Viewer” command in the Item menu now reads “Close Viewer” while the inline viewer is open.
• The “Overlay Names” preference moved from the General preference pane (in beta versions of Iris) to the Special pane since this feature is still experimental.
• Dragging a large photo out of Iris is faster and no longer stalls the interface.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the most common crash reported on macOS Tahoe.

New Features

Drag photos out of Iris

You can now drag a photo or video from the grid or the list straight into another app — Finder, Mail, Messages, Acorn, anywhere that accepts a file. Iris hands over the original file whenever it can read it. If the original isn't reachable — an external drive is unplugged, or an iCloud asset was never downloaded — Iris drags the cached thumbnail instead. (Thanks to Alexis)

Copy (⌘C)

Edit → Copy now copies the selected photo to the clipboard: the file itself, the image, and its filename, so it pastes usefully into whichever app you switch to.

A quieter way to hear about updates

Iris no longer interrupts you with an update window when a new version is available. A blue Update Available button appears in the toolbar instead — click it when you're ready to install. Choosing Check for Updates… from the menu bar still shows the usual update window immediately. (Thanks to Rogue Amoeba for the great idea. h/t to DF)

Fixes

Arrow-key navigation in the grid and list

Pressing the left arrow key in the grid incorrectly moved focus to the sidebar at the start of every row instead of only at the very first photo, and the right arrow key didn't wrap to the next row at all. Both arrow keys now move through your library one item at a time and wrap between rows. The list view now moves focus to the sidebar when the left arrow key is pressed and back with the right arrow. (Thanks to EdR)

New Features

Filter by orientation

A new Image Orientation option lets you narrow your library to Portrait, Landscape, Square, or Panorama photos and videos in the advanced filter editor. (View → Filter Items or ⌥⌘F)

See your lens make & model

Iris now records the lens make and model for your photos and shows it in the inspector. Lens information is also searchable.

Create a person from your Contacts

When adding a new person, you can now choose "Choose from Contacts…" to pull their name and birthdate straight from a card in the macOS Contacts app, instead of typing it in by hand. (Thanks to AB, MF, C, and others.)

Surprise Me

A new Sidebar Surprise Me! command (⌥⇧⌘9) jumps you to a random spot in your library — a fun way to rediscover old photos. This is in addition to the existing Surprise Me! command that jumps directly to a random photo or video.

More detail in the Source inspector

Selecting a Source now shows the total number of screenshots in addition to images and videos in the inspector.

What's new?

Added a "Release Notes" item under the "Help" menu that displays release notes from all previous versions.

Fixes

Apple Photos edits now show up in Iris

If you edit a photo in Apple Photos, Iris more reliably displays your edited version rather than the untouched original. Iris will need to one-time, re-scan for edits in your Apple Photos library to "catch up" after this update.

JPEG/HEIC + RAW Photos in Apple Photos

When available, show the "developed" version of a RAW photo in an Apple Photos library. (Thanks to JG)

Corrected capture dates from filenames

Iris no longer misreads sequence numbers in filenames as dates. For example, a file named 2026-06-00025.JPG was incorrectly guessed as June 25 — it's now handled correctly. (Thanks to MK)

Ghost Videos

Fixed a bug where a video would continue playing audio after you switched to the map view.

Crash fixes

• Fixed a crash in the grid view that could occur when an item was reprocessed in the background.
• Improved database resilience: Iris now automatically repairs certain internal inconsistencies so libraries continue to open and heal themselves rather than failing. (Thanks to MB)

"On This Day" with no people

The Go → On This Day menu now shows a clearly disabled "No People" entry when your library doesn't have any people yet, instead of behaving unexpectedly.

Person age accuracy

Corrected a bug where a person's age was calculated incorrectly if they were born on December 31.

Interface Polish

• Renamed the "Jump to" menu item to "Open Quickly".
• Reordered the items in the Go menu.
• Reordered the fields in the Details inspector.
• Fixed the Help window's title and default size and position. (Thanks to JG)

New Features

Iris is now better at noticing when your media changes and refreshes it automatically.

• Files edited on disk in a folder Source are detected and reprocessed — thumbnails, EXIF, and ML output are regenerated.
• Edited Apple Photos assets are detected and reprocessed as well.
• Items you delete outside of Iris from a folder Source or Apple Photos library are also removed from Iris.
• New "Refresh" item added to the Source context menu to manually rescan a Source. (Thanks, JH)

Open Items in other Applications

• Added new "Open" (⌘O) and "Open With..." commands to the "Item" menu that let you open the selected Item in an external app. (Thanks, GM)

Alternate app icons

• Escape from Squircle Jail 🎉 Choose from additional app icons from the Special preferences pane. (Thanks, MG)

Put Faces in the macOS Dock

• Turn on the new "Show Faces in Dock" preference in Settings → Special. Then, you can add pictures of your favorite people to the Dock. Why? Why not.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Re-open the Status Window on launch if previously open. (Thanks, AB)
• When switching between sidebar nodes, the Inspector panel is better at handling when no items are selected.
• Fixed the most common crash on macOS Tahoe. (NSToolbar 🙄)
• Fixed grid/map/list and inspector tab menu items being enabled when they weren't actually available.
• Correctly count the number of times a person appears "Alone" when viewing their statistics.
• ML generated tags are (hopefully!) better at avoiding false positives.
• You can now dismiss the "No Locations" card from the Locations view. (Thanks, CL)
• Uses the correct Apple Photos capture date when reprocessing changed assets.
• Deceased names are now hidden from an item's "On This Day." (Thanks, MJ)
• Deceased names are now hidden from the "Add to Person" menu. (Thanks, MJ)
• Support for approximate dates and age ranges when an item's exact dates aren't known.

• Fix a crash that could occur when viewing the Metadata inspector.
• Improved the performance of the People inspector when viewing a PNG image with many faces.

This update is focused on fixing crashes found in the first release. Thank you to everyone who has been reporting them.

• Crash could occur when a photo contained non-numeric characters in the EXIF date.
• Crash would occur when performing an advanced search and using "Starts with" or "Contains" on an item's "Filename".
• Crash could occur when scrolling the grid view and quickly switching sidebar nodes.