Where your library actually lives
When you use Raza Photos or Raza Music, your files stay exactly where they are — in whatever folders you already have on your Mac. The app reads them there and indexes their metadata into a local database. Nothing is copied, nothing is uploaded, nothing is moved.
When you browse your library on an iPhone or iPad, your photos or music are served directly from your Mac over your home Wi-Fi. Your phone is talking to your Mac, not to a data center somewhere.
When your Mac is off, there is nothing to connect to. That is not a bug. That is the system working exactly as designed.
Cloud storage vs. local storage
Most photo and music apps are built around cloud storage. That comes with real tradeoffs worth understanding.
- ✗Monthly or yearly subscription
- ✗Your library on someone else's servers
- ✗Access depends on the company staying in business
- ✗Requires internet to browse your own library
- ✗Subject to data breaches you have no control over
- ✗Terms of service can change at any time
- ✓One-time purchase, no subscription
- ✓Your library on your own hardware
- ✓Works forever, regardless of what happens to us
- ✓Works without internet, within your home network
- ✓No external server means no external breach
- ✓Your files, in open formats, always
The honest tradeoff: backup is your responsibility
Cloud storage services include offsite backup as part of what you pay for. Our apps do not. If your Mac's hard drive fails and you have no backup, you could lose your library.
This is the one real cost of local-first storage. We think it is worth being honest about it rather than pretending it does not exist.
That said, good backup solutions for local libraries are straightforward and many are either free or already included with your Mac:
The 3-2-1 rule is a sensible baseline: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy offsite. Time Machine plus one external drive satisfies this.
What you actually own
When your library is in iCloud, Spotify, or Google Photos, you are a tenant. The service can change its pricing, its terms, or shut down entirely. Companies get acquired. Storage tiers change. In 2011, Google said Google Photos would be free forever. In 2020, they changed their mind.
When your library is on your own drive, you are the owner. Raza Photos or Raza Music could disappear tomorrow and your files would be completely unaffected — they are still in the same folders, in the same formats, readable by any software that opens them. We deliberately use open metadata standards so that your organisational work — your albums, your tags, your location data — lives in the files themselves, not locked in a proprietary database.
The subscription model creates a dependency. You pay not to access the service, but to keep access to your own memories. We find that arrangement difficult to justify.