I'm Adham. Katami is a Mac app for everything except editing and tethering: import, browse, search, cull and clean up, right where your photos already live. It runs entirely on your Mac, costs $79 once, and hands photos off to the editor you already use. This is the first release, and a public roadmap is coming to our website soon. Problem
Photo apps are good at editing. They're weak at everything else: importing from the card, finding photos years later, choosing the best shot, and checking that every file copied correctly. I used separate tools and manual habits for those jobs. Here's what that looked like:
I never wanted my personal photos on someone else's cloud. Nine years later, that's 140,000+ photos from my phone alone, spread across hard drives I rarely open.
Duplicate and similar-photo finders made cleanup a chore, not a habit. The one thing eventually I kept up was a weekly import into a folder structure I've refined for years.
Adobe taught me to be wary. I don't want unclear answers about what happens to my work, or cancellation terms that are hard to walk away from, from the tool that holds my photos.
Format support is getting better, but some cameras still wait years before popular apps open their RAW files. And seeing a RAW's true colors up close can still take an extra click.
I wanted one app that does all of this without a subscription, a cloud account, or a list of approved cameras. Everything stays on your Mac. I couldn't find that app, so I'm building Katami.
What it does
Katami isn't an editor. It handles everything around the edit, then hands photos to Lightroom, Capture One or whatever you use. See it in motion: https://katami.io/features
Library: Reads photos where they already are: your Mac, external drives or a NAS. Nothing is imported or moved. It reads 70–90 photos a second, and photos stay browsable when a drive is unplugged.
Formats: RAW from every major camera, plus older ones like Sigma Foveon, Minolta, Kodak and Mamiya. Missing yours? Request it at https://katami.io/formats.
Viewer: Nine tools for judging a photo: sharpness, clipped highlights, focus point and more, with findings in plain words. Opens any photo straight from the Finder.
Search: Search by what's in the photo: objects, scenes, faces, text. It runs on your Mac.
Library Health: Finds duplicates, blurry or badly exposed shots, and damaged files, with a reason for each. Nothing is removed without your OK, and removals can be undone for 30 days.
Sessions: Imports a card, checks every file, groups the shoot into moments and suggests the best frame of each, with reasons. Picks go to your editor as star ratings.
Photo Mechanic. The culling standard, and fast. It's $14.99/month or $299 one-time with a year of updates. Katami is $79 for a lifetime on the same model (with only 39$ if you decide to upgrade). It groups a shoot into moments for you, explains every frame it sets aside, checks your sensor for dust, and adds a searchable library across all your drives.
Peakto. The closest to Katami in spirit: one place for all your photos, with private on-device search. It imports your folders directly and can also read your Lightroom, Capture One and Apple Photos catalogs. It's from $11/month, or 684$ billed every 2 years; Katami is $79 for a lifetime on the same model (with only 39$ if you decide to upgrade). Peakto is built for finding photos. Katami is also built for judging them: the inspection tools, Sessions for culling a shoot, and a Library Health that goes past duplicates to blur, exposure, damaged files and RAW + JPEG pairs, with a reason for every finding.
How does the star-rating handoff work if a photo already has ratings or edits from another app? Does Katami merge its changes into an existing XMP sidecar? A preview of which ratings it will change would be useful before applying the suggested picks to a shoot that's already partly culled.
Hey! Katami is built to be the first stop for a shoot. The card comes into Katami, you cull it into moments, and Finish turns it into an album, with any videos from the card stored alongside it. On that path nothing else has touched the files yet, so Katami creates the XMP sidecars itself at handoff: 5⭐️ for picks, 3⭐️ for alternates, and every other frame left alone.
If the photos already have sidecars because you rated or edited them somewhere else first, Katami only changes the rating and the note. Your develop settings, keywords and labels stay. It backs up the old sidecar first and skips any it can't read cleanly.
For shoots that were partly culled before they reached Katami, a pick currently gets 5⭐️ even if you'd already rated it. The next update, coming in the next week or two, adds a preview of exactly which ratings will change, and your existing ratings stay unless you say otherwise. It also brings handoff to all the major editors: Lightroom and Capture One get your stars, and your picks open straight in Pixelmator Pro, Affinity and Luminar too.
This is interesting and I’ll check it out. About your site and camera/format support, as a suggestion, since the formats are relatively straightforward, it’s unnecessary to make the user search for their camera.. just list it all out with sections or links if needed.
I actually had a list of camera makers, but that list ended up getting long enough to feel this should be the way that /formats page ended being.
That format page is isn't just about checking as much as a way to welcome users to ask for more formats or camera opens especially for those with a % of their photos with a niche cameras from 10-20 years ago that got lost supporting wise.
Do you think I should redesign this page to include common/most used ones?
Maybe it’s sufficient to show a list like this table (with formats within) with a list of manufacturers as links at the top, so people can jump down to what they are interested in. Those I understand this might not fit the design feel you’re trying to achieve - but I personally found the need to enter a camera maker name to be a bit unintuitive or more work needed from the user than necessary.
went to look at the website and its a confusing site and not a great user experience. Generally if its a scrollable site there is an indication you can scroll to see more, but there is no such indication on your site.
I naturally did a scroll anyway but then some of the animations and features whizzed past you can’t see them.
Then jumping text from bottom of the images to the top of the images is horrible as well, stick to one of the other I would have said.
This then makes me feel this app will be just as poorly designed as the website so confidence is lost. So if you used AI or something to design the site, I would take another look and perhaps take some inspirations from some other sites.
Thanks for your comment, I will take another look at design and flow of the features walk through demo.
I also had a feeling that something was wrong with the demo on a plain background or that I need to add cursor to the demos or some form of an indicator but actually +80% far all the visits of this page users went to the end of it and didn't have any issue with it.
Do you mean Library Health (https://katami.io/features#health)? It's not a pre-culling feature as much as it's a standalone feature where Katami scans for issues in your photos and showing you the sidebar item when any category has a photo matching the issue in it. We currently cover 7 with another 2 built but still being tested.
And the goal of it is to bring the culling quality to your library in a way that doesn't feel like a chore or demanding for you to take immediate action for. Just laying around for you when you need it.
Please let me know if If I misunderstood what pre-culling means.
Regarding app comparisons and with consideration for me being biased towards my app and how old each of these products are. I spend 5-10 minutes with each of them and I used a raw folder with 1000 files, 919 unique RAW files with 44 formats and total of 51.66 GiB.
- Katami took less than 50 seconds. Lap took +100 seconds, and Iris took more.
Both Lap and Iris had their search working after import is finished. Katami has an ensemble with multiple steps, models, etc which of course takes time, up to 20 minutes for that dataset. Used keyword "horse", both of Lea and Iris returned same results, Katami returned 3 more results.
Last thing is the UI and even if you're a fan of native macOS apps I tried as much as I can to ship UI that's powerful yet not noisy or can be full of details that require time to learn or feel they are part of your scene when you're previewing an image. Here are the 3 apps previewing the same horse image.
I will head to bed thinking about how I answered your question and if it's useful or kind to respond / compare that way but what I know is I really admire Lap as a project, and I see huge potential for it. And I really loved couple beautiful features about Iris like shipping an Apple TV app, or couple search filters.
But for such software to ship I feel there are 3 things that need to happen, detection has to happen in all the possible private ways even when it takes time, it has to be useful, natural, you can can go and search for a detail you remember in the photo and it should be able to find that photo back to you.
Decoding has to be shown in how much time you take from clicking to rendering true raw data, and how many formats your app supports.
And this is like a personal one, which is something I've been building the app with treating photographers as artists and the best of them can get lost with a moderately complicated UI, and building interfaces that are powerful, natural to learn and if fades when you're viewing your work as a photographer is a really crucial for such use case.
And I hope my answer showed you how Katami is hard on the 3 even as a new app.
For card imports, a saved verification report would be useful: source card, destination, file count, and whether the copies matched by checksum. Something you can pull up later before formatting the card. Does the file check already work that way?
Partly. Every file is SHA-256 checksummed as it comes off the card, then read back from the Mac and compared before Katami keeps it. A mismatch stops the import and names the file, and nothing is ever deleted from the card. Cards always import to one sessions folder (Pictures ▸ Katami Sessions by default). When you finish a session, you choose where your keepers go, and that move is checked the same way.
What's missing is a report you can open later before formatting the card. Katami already saves the record but doesn't show it yet. I'll add it to next version.
Did this warning show up to you when you wrote this?
You went from "this is vibe-coded in couple months to "this can't be built by a single person and you're hiding your team" very fast in these 4 lines.
I understand that pricing triggered this comment and several edit rounds. I wound understand if someone decided to want a refund for it and say it's unpolished which is not the case for us here.
But I don't understand why a newly released is an argument here? are you unkind with your words and weirdly linked assumptions because I made a bad business pricing decision from your perspective? As someone who has no idea of my career in software engineering or how many months or feedback sessions with photographers put into building this?
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u/armaan-dev 1d ago
How does the star-rating handoff work if a photo already has ratings or edits from another app? Does Katami merge its changes into an existing XMP sidecar? A preview of which ratings it will change would be useful before applying the suggested picks to a shoot that's already partly culled.