For photographers with more archive than they can remember

Search every drive
like one archive.

Nevervault makes a scattered RAW and video archive searchable on your Mac. Externals, NAS shares, decades of folders: describe the frame you remember and it's there. No catalog. No import. Nothing moved or touched.

Download on the Mac App Store See how it works

Coming soon to the Mac App Store · 14-day free trial, no card

red dress on the beach, golden hour|

Searching Studio NAS T7 Shield 2019 Backup · unplugged, previews still searchable

98%

▶

94%

Read-only over your originals On-device & offline No cloud, no account Built for Apple silicon

Why it exists

Your archive should never become a vault.

Years of work can disappear without ever being deleted. A shoot gets backed up to an old drive. A client folder is copied twice. A Lightroom catalog points at part of the job. The NAS holds everything, and finding anything means digging through dates, folders, and guesses.

The files are safe. They're just buried. Nevervault keeps every drive, every shoot, every frame in reach.

Find photos by memory, not folder names.

Search the way you remember the image: subject, light, color, place, mood. Nevervault reads what's in the frame, so the words you'd use to describe a shot are enough to find it. Year, camera, lens, and format are one filter away.

“red dress on the beach, golden hour” “black car in studio, hard shadows” “couple walking through the city at night” “surfer backlit by sunset spray” “black and white portrait outside a church” “empty gym, window light”

Or anything else you'd say out loud. Semantic search runs entirely on your Mac.

One index

Every drive, one view.

External drives, SSDs, local folders, and NAS shares become one searchable index. Nevervault doesn't ask you to reorganize a decade of work before it becomes useful. Connect the archive you already have and search it like it was always one library.

Unplug a drive and its previews stay searchable. Plug it back in and Nevervault reconnects it on its own.

Studio NAS

412,806 photos · online

T7 Shield

88,110 photos · online

2019 Backup

191,437 photos · unplugged, previews kept

One search across all three

Light by design

Built for RAW archives.

Huge RAW files, video clips, sidecars, exports, and duplicate folders: this is what Nevervault is designed around. It indexes with tiny previews and metadata instead of copying your archive into another bloated library.

Terabytes of originals stay exactly where they are. What lives on your Mac is measured in gigabytes.

Your originals

Terabytes, untouched, on their drives

What Nevervault stores

Tiny previews + a search index, on your Mac

Set a storage ceiling and Nevervault stays under it. Clear previews for any folder whenever you want the space back.

Signal, not noise

Clean stacks, fewer duplicates.

A burst of forty frames is one moment, not forty results. Nevervault groups near-identical frames into visual stacks and collapses exact duplicates, so a thousand-shot day reads as the day.

Nothing is hidden for good and nothing is deleted. Every frame stays one click inside its stack, and you choose how aggressive grouping is.

40 frames One result

Beyond stills

Your video is searchable too.

Nevervault indexes the frames inside your clips, not just a thumbnail. Describe the moment the way you'd describe a photo and jump straight to it in the footage.

Most photo tools stop at stills. Your archive doesn't, so your search shouldn't either.

A7S3_0142.mov 04:12

The frame that matched, found inside the clip

Into your workflow

Preview fast. Open anywhere.

Browse results in a fast built-in viewer, flip through a stack, then send the original straight to Camera Raw, Photoshop, or Lightroom with one shortcut.

Nevervault is not here to replace your editor. It sits before your tools, across everything, and gets you to the right file faster.

Open in Photoshop ⌘R Reveal in Finder Open Folder

The original file, in your editor. Nevervault never makes a copy.

How it works

Three steps. Then it's just there.

Point it at a drive

Pick a folder, an external, or a NAS share. No import, no catalog to build, nothing to reorganize first.

It indexes, read-only

Tiny previews and an on-device search index build in the background. You can start searching while it works.

Describe what you want

Search your whole archive in plain words. Open the original, reveal it in Finder, or jump to its folder.

Privacy

Local-first by design.

Your files should not need to be uploaded to someone else's cloud just to become searchable.

Everything on your Mac

Indexing and search run on-device, tuned for Apple silicon. No cloud processing, no account, and it works fully offline.

Read-only, always

Nevervault opens your originals read-only. It cannot move, rename, convert, or delete a file. Your archive is never restructured.

Yours to control

No telemetry. The previews and index live on your Mac, capped by a storage limit you set, and you can clear them anytime.

Why I built this

I'm a photographer. Somewhere across a NAS and a shelf of drives I have a few hundred thousand RAW files: a decade of shoots, travel, events, work I was proud of and forgot I had.

When I wanted a specific frame, I had nothing. Lightroom buckled at that scale. Photos refused to index a network drive. Everything else wanted me to import, to copy and rebuild my whole archive just to look through it.

So I built the tool I wanted: point it at the drive, leave every file exactly where it is, and search the whole thing by describing what I remember. Nevervault is that, hardened until I trusted it with my own originals. I hope it finds your work for you too.

Zachary Owens

Photographer & developer · Sacramento, CA

Pricing

Try everything for 14 days.

Start with a 14-day trial of the full app, no card. After that, Nevervault stays useful free: your library remains fully indexed and you get 20 searches a week. Go Pro whenever you want more.

Monthly

$8.99 / month

Month-to-month. Cancel anytime.

Choose monthly

Unlimited plain-English search
Search inside your video
Advanced filters: camera, lens, format
Every drive, indexed read-only
On-device & fully private

Best value

Yearly

$69.99 / year

That's $5.83 a month, about 35% off.

Choose yearly

Unlimited plain-English search
Search inside your video
Advanced filters: camera, lens, format
Every drive, indexed read-only
On-device & fully private

Founder Lifetime First 100

$129 once

Pay once, keep it. A launch thank-you, limited run.

Get lifetime

Unlimited plain-English search
Search inside your video
Advanced filters: camera, lens, format
Every drive, indexed read-only
On-device & fully private

Indexing and browsing are never capped, on any plan. Pro adds unlimited search, video indexing, and advanced filters.

Questions, answered

Does Nevervault change my photos?

No. Nevervault opens your originals read-only. It cannot move, rename, convert, or delete anything. It only stores its own tiny previews and search index on your Mac.

Do I need Lightroom or a catalog?

No. Nevervault works directly on your folders of RAW files, wherever they live. There is nothing to import and no catalog to maintain. It sits before your editor, not in place of it.

Where do my photos go? Is anything uploaded?

Nowhere. All indexing and search happen on your Mac. There is no cloud, no account, and no telemetry. Nevervault works fully offline.

Does it really search video?

Yes. Nevervault indexes the frames inside your clips, so footage is searchable the same way your stills are. Most photo tools stop at the thumbnail.

What happens when the trial ends?

Nevervault stays useful free. Your library remains fully indexed and browsable, and you get 20 searches a week. Pro removes the search limit and adds video indexing and advanced filters.

What do I need to run it?

A Mac with Apple silicon on macOS 14 or later. Nevervault is tuned for the Neural Engine, which is what keeps search fast across huge archives.

Search every drivelike one archive.