The Photo Housekeeper™ team are dedicated photographers who have been Mac addicts since the very beginning — 1984!
We remember when Mac OS lived on a single-sided 400K floppy disc, and the first hard drive we ever saw was a 5MB Winchester the size of a small suitcase. Our first Mac hard drive was a 20MB SCSI drive, and at the time we genuinely wondered if we'd ever fill it.
Fast-forward a few decades, and now a single photograph won't fit on that old drive. 50MB RAW files are the norm, and even 100 JPEGs can chew through half a gigabyte without breaking a sweat.
A 1TB or 2TB drive sounds like a lot — until you load it up with stacks of RAW files and hundreds of “similar, not duplicate” photos of the waiter delivering your birthday cake. (Why take one or two shots when you can hold the shutter down and get twenty?) It doesn't take long to run out of space.
Hence, Photo Housekeeper. It does two things — simply, efficiently, and well.
1.
Photo Housekeeper scans your whole Photos library, a specific album, or a date range you choose, and hunts down groups of similar images. It gathers each group into its own named album so you can review them side by side and decide what stays and what goes.
2.
Point it at an album, your whole library, or a date range, and it will round up every RAW file, drop them into a named album, and let you convert them to JPEGs at whatever maximum size you choose — from 500KB all the way up to 10MB.
And the golden rule: Photo Housekeeper never deletes a single file on its own. It finds, it sorts, it suggests — you decide. Total control stays with you, always.
The first time we ran it on our own library, we freed up nearly 400GB. Every library is different, of course, but we're confident many photographers are sitting on gigabytes of easy, painless savings.
One last thing to remember: for ordinary viewing on an iPhone, iPad or even a large television, a well-made 6MB JPEG will often be virtually indistinguishable from the much larger RAW original. Try it — we think you'll agree.
Photo Housekeeper does its photo analysis and conversion locally, right there on your Mac. Your photographs are not uploaded by Photo Housekeeper for processing, and nobody but you sees your library. It reads your Photos library, performs its comparisons and conversions on-device, and writes the results back into named albums. Internet access is used only where necessary for functions such as license activation.
Photo Housekeeper requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and works directly with your existing Apple Photos library — no separate import or conversion step required.
Photo Housekeeper was built by Julian Solomons, a Mac user since 1984 and a photographer who got tired of paying for hard drives just to store twenty near-identical shots of the same sunset. What started as a personal solution to tidy up an overflowing library turned into the tool you're looking at now.
If we're honest, it's personal too — I'd been meaning to sit down and clean up years of similar shots and duplicates for ages, but kept putting it off. Photo Housekeeper did what would have been days of work, in minutes.
Ready to see how much space you're sitting on? Download Photo Housekeeper and find out — you may be surprised by what you discover.