Side quest 02 · Started
An original idea
Your photo library, by the day it was taken.
A native macOS app for browsing the photos, videos, audio and PDFs on your disk, organised by the date they were captured. It finds faces, places and the text inside your photos, all on your Mac, 100% offline.
Take the tour
Real screens from the app. Pick one to look closer; they follow this site’s light and dark mode.
The story
01The itch
It started with thousands of photos and videos on an SSD, in no useful order.
The first fix was Gallery Sorter, a small Rust command-line tool that reads each file's real capture date and copies everything into tidy Year / Month / Day folders.
02The quest
Copying files into folders works once. Trove skips the copying: point it at any folder or drive and it indexes everything into a date tree you can browse, while your originals stay exactly where they are, untouched.
The first version took two days and 78 commits: the date tree, previews and filters on day one, then places, scene labels, text search and people on day two.
03The hard part
Trove tags scenes, reads the text in screenshots and groups faces into people you can name. All of it runs through Apple Vision on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, ever.
Places had to work offline too, so GPS tags are turned into a country and city with no network call, and the world map ships inside the app.
04The detail
Favourites, people's names and the analysis cache can live in a hidden .trove folder inside your media folder. Plug the drive into another Mac and Trove opens it straight away, with no re-analysis.
Under the hood
Rust walks the disk, keeps a SQLite index and does the heavy lifting, so the virtualised tree stays smooth with tens of thousands of files.
EXIF DateTimeOriginal for photos and the moov/mvhd header for MP4 and MOV, falling back to the file's modified time.
A Swift helper runs scene labelling, text recognition and face detection, then clusters faces into people you can name and merge.
Tauri renders in macOS's own WebKit, so HEIC photos and HEVC videos play without converting them first.
Download the DMG for Apple Silicon Macs (macOS 11 or later), drag Trove into Applications, and point it at a folder. It isn't notarised yet, so the release page shows how to open it the first time.
Join the conversation
Questions, ideas, bug reports or kind words: all welcome.
