PhotowallEvery photo on your drive, in one wall.
Point Photowall at a hard drive or folder. It finds every photo in every subfolder and lays them out in one scrollable wall, sorted by month, like the Photos app. Nothing is uploaded.
July 2026
June 2026
Three steps, no setup
Built for the drive full of backups that you can only browse one folder at a time in Finder.
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1
Choose a drive or folder
Click the button or drag it onto the window. Internal folders, external drives, exFAT drives and old backup folders all work.
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2
Let it build the wall
It makes a small thumbnail of every photo, skips app icons and cache files, and shows a copy saved in several backups only once.
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3
Scroll, search, jump
Jump to any year, search by file or folder name, and click a photo for full size and where it lives on disk. Click Update later and only new photos are added.
Your photos never leave your Mac
Photowall has no account, no cloud and no tracking. It contains no networking code at all.
Read-only
Your photos are only ever read, never moved, renamed or edited. The only thing Photowall writes is its own _Photo Gallery folder.
Works offline
The wall is a plain web page saved next to your photos. Open it in any browser, with or without the app, even with Wi-Fi off.
Easy to remove
Delete the _Photo Gallery folder and it's as if Photowall never ran. Drag the app to the Trash and it's gone.
Questions
Is it really free?
Yes. No trial, no ads and no account. It's a small tool we built for our own 8 TB photo drive and decided to share.
How long does the first run take?
It depends on your drive. A few thousand photos take a minute or two. Tens of thousands on a spinning hard drive can take an hour or more. You can stop at any time and pick up where you left off. After that, updates only process new photos, so they take seconds.
How does it know when a photo was taken?
From the date the camera saved in the photo. If there isn't one, it uses a date in the folder name, such as "Seattle, July 4, 2023" or "2019-05-02 Party". Photos with neither go into an Undated section at the end instead of being put in the wrong month.
Which photos does it find?
JPEG, HEIC, PNG, GIF, WebP, TIFF and RAW files from most cameras (DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2). Videos aren't included yet.
Where is the wall saved?
In a _Photo Gallery folder inside the drive or folder you chose, so it travels with the drive. If that location is read-only, it goes to Pictures › Photowall instead. Thumbnails are small, about 25 KB each.
Can I share a wall with someone?
The wall shows thumbnails of everything on the drive, so share the whole drive rather than just the _Photo Gallery folder. Full-size photos open from the drive itself.
How do I report a problem or suggest something?
In the app, choose Help › Send Feedback, or click "Send feedback or request a feature" on the main window. Or email hello@ahginnovations.com. We read everything.
Windows?
Mac only for now. Join the Pro waitlist and tick "Windows version" if you'd use one.
Coming next
Photowall Pro
Photowall stays free. If enough people want more, we'll build a Pro version with features like:
- Videos on the wall alongside your photos
- Find and clean up duplicate copies to free up space
- Share a single album or month as a link
- A Windows version
See all your photos again
Free for Mac. Signed and checked by Apple.