Your photo library,
on your Mac, forever.
Self-hosted photos with the polish of Apple Photos and the power of Immich — without the Docker setup, the cloud subscription, or the privacy trade-off.
What you get
Every feature runs locally on your Mac's silicon. No Python, no Docker, no Internet round-trip for ML.
Native ML pipeline
Face detection, scene tagging, OCR, and CLIP smart search all run on the Neural Engine and Metal GPU. Hundreds of thousands of photos in hours, not days.
Phone backup that just works
The official Immich iOS and Android apps pair directly with Phovi — point them at your Mac, log in, enable auto-backup. No fork, no special build.
Smart duplicate detection
Cosine-LSH banding over Apple Vision feature prints. Finds re-saves and format conversions across a 200,000-asset library in minutes.
Real-time pipeline dashboard
See what's running on which silicon unit, with live throughput and ETAs. Pause, schedule for night-only, or tune concurrency per pipeline.
Library on any drive
Internal SSD, Thunderbolt RAID, USB stick — pick a folder and Phovi stores there. Move it anytime; the database stays on local SSD for performance.
Privacy by default
No telemetry, no analytics SDKs, no remote anything. Crash reports and usage counters are off until you explicitly opt in.
Why not just use Immich?
Immich is excellent, and Phovi is mobile-app-compatible with it. But Immich is a Linux + Docker product — its install guide runs six pages. Phovi is the one-click Mac alternative.
| Phovi | Immich (self-host) | iCloud Photos | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Install time | ~30 seconds | ~30 minutes (Docker, reverse proxy, TLS) | Built-in |
| Ongoing cost | £6.99 once | Free + your hardware | £0.99–£8.99/month, scales with library |
| Photos stay on your Mac | Yes | Yes, with self-hosting | No — Apple's servers |
| ML on Apple Silicon | Native (Vision, CoreML) | CUDA / CPU container | Native |
| Mobile backup app | Immich app | Immich app | iOS Photos |
Ready in under a minute.
Download, drag to Applications, point at the folder where you want your library to live. Phovi does the rest.
Download Phovi for macOS