Updates on Raza Photos

Raza Photos, running on desktop, tablet and phone

I am happy to announce the second version of Raza Photos, and a brand new app to go with it, Raza Music. I already explained the philosophy of these apps, and it’s simple: some of us just don’t want to pay a subscription to keep our photos online, on a server we know nothing about.

Yes, the cloud provides total backup, complete safety, and heavily tested custom file systems dedicated to keep data corruption free. We all get that. But maybe we don’t want it. Maybe I just want my photos and my music on my plain external drive connected to my Mac Mini, without servers, without containers, without any kind of setup, available on my iPhone when I want it. Maybe I paid so much already for all the subscriptions that I thrown my way every day, that a plain external drive is a breath of fresh air.

The problem with the external hard drive is that apps don’t know how to use it. Apple Photos doesn’t know how to reach my library on my drive. I need to upload it first to iCloud. Yes, we can enable file sharing and I can see and browse the drive itself on my iPhone, but that’s just viewing the photo or music folder in Finder. We want a photo and a music app that can work with media sitting on a different computer in the home network.

And so, we have a few options. First, full blown media servers like Plex or Immich or many others. Some are open-source, some are kind of free but not really, some ask for accounts, and some are locked in subscriptions. Some have weird web interfaces, with web interfaces dressed up as mobile apps, or web interfaces dressed as desktop apps because we are in the age of electron.js, right? Others look like they were made in the nineties. Either way, all of them require a lot of setup. Servers, Linux configurations, software containers, tinkering, cloning of GitHub repos, commands running in the console like an endless inventory sheet, some working, some failing because the Linux distribution is bad, or there are obscure dependencies not met. Again, all this work just to produce a limited, complicated or downright horrible experience.

So a few months ago I announced Raza Photos. The first version. Today, I am here to talk about Raza Photos v2.

The big update

Photo by Jingda Chen on Unsplash

First, Raza Photos now supports photo transfer from iOS to macOS. It can reach into your Apple Photos library on your phone or tablet and transfer everything straight into your own Raza Photos library, sitting on your Mac Mini or wherever you choose. You don’t need to manually export anything. Raza Photos takes care of the whole process. Whenever you browse photos on your phone or tablet, Raza Photos will also backup everything to the library you selected, in the background.

Of course, if iCloud Photo sync is on, the Apple Photos library is really the iCloud library, downloaded in full resolution and handed off to your Raza Photos library on your storage drive. Easy getaway from the cloud. And again, without any unnecessary uploads, accounts, extra steps, nothing. If you have multiple Raza Photos libraries, say one on your Mac Mini and one on your MacBook, you can select where the transfer will go.

The small update

Photo by Alaric Duan on Unsplash

Besides photo transfer, Raza Photos now comes with a Random Photo of the Day widget, which you can configure as you like. You can select the albums or events from where the pick will be made, the people it should feature, the dates and places. So you can have your own customized daily photo sitting on your desktop.

Also, all your devices will get the same photo of the day, so everybody in the house can enjoy and talk about the same thing. And yes, if you have multiple libraries, one on the Mac Mini and another on the MacBook, you will get a random pick from the combined libraries. What you browse is also what the widget browses when picking the photo of the day.

Other parts of the app have been brushed up too, bringing faster browsing, fewer bugs, smoother scrolling through large libraries, better handling of burst photo groups, and safer networking.

The surprise

Raza Music, similar to Raza Photos

And as if all of this weren’t enough, I managed to add another media type to the library: music! Yes, we have a new app, Raza Music, taking everything from Raza Photos and applying it to music. No, you can’t transfer your Apple Music library to your storage. But if you happen to be a music collector and have that folder with music you cherish above all else and were struggling to play it on all your devices, now you can.

Just like with photos, the music is streamed, not synced, so you don’t wreak havoc on your iPhone storage, and you can tag it and organize it from any device in your home. Right on the couch on the iPad for example. Again, no internet required, no messy setups, no software containers on arcane Linux servers. You already have the library. Go listen to it anywhere!

And there is a daily pick again in the app, the album, artist, and song of the day, plus another random twenty songs selected for your enjoyment.

Now, the apps are not perfect. They work only in your home network, but I am researching and figuring out ways to have them safely and privately made available when you step out of the house. It will probably involve Tailscale and some magic. I’m on it. And also casting to other speakers and SharePlay listening are in the works for Raza Music v2.

But until then, happy browsing!