User Guide
The Iris Mac app includes a built-in user guide you can access via Help → Iris Help in the menu bar. Or, you can browse it on this website.
Email us
For any question, bug, feature request, or just to chat: hello@irisphotos.app.
Real humans on the other end. Usually a reply within one business day.
Common questions
Will Iris change or reorganize my Apple Photos library?
No. When you add an Apple Photos library as a source, Iris opens it read-only. It reads your photos, videos, and metadata to build its own separate library on your Mac — but it never writes back. Your albums, edits, favorites, keywords, People, and the entire structure of your Photos library are left exactly as they are. You can keep using Photos.app at the same time; it’s completely unaffected. Iris even reads your existing favorites during the first scan, so they become your new favorites in Iris — a one-way read, never a change to Photos.
Why doesn’t Iris recognize a person I just named in new photos?
Face matching is probabilistic. Iris won’t assign a face to a person unless it’s reasonably confident. New people are particularly hard early on because Iris doesn’t yet have many examples.
The fix: open the People tab on a few photos and assign people to unknown faces. After 5–10 confirmations, recognition usually becomes much more reliable. See People and face recognition.
Iris is using a lot of CPU. What’s happening?
Open the Pipeline Status window (⌘⇧1). If a stage is active — especially ML and transcription, — that’s the cause. The pipeline tries to stay polite (priorities are tuned to keep the UI responsive), but it does do a lot of heavy work the first time it scans your library.
Options:
- Wait it out — the pipeline goes idle when it finishes.
- Disable one or more stages in Settings → Library to skip them.
How do I remove a source without losing my photos?
Right‑click the source in the sidebar and choose Delete. This removes the source from Iris’s database — your actual files on disk are completely untouched.
Reporting a bug
When you write in, including the following helps us help you faster:
- Your macOS version
- Your Iris version (Iris menu → About Iris)
- Steps to reproduce the issue
- What you expected vs what actually happened
- A screenshot if visual, or a copy of any error text
System requirements
- macOS 15 or later
- Apple Silicon or Intel Mac
- ~125 MB free disk space for Iris itself; library size depends on photo count