Why this exists
The Apple ecosystem should be the obvious answer. You have a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, and your photos and music live on the Mac. Yet Apple's built-in way to see that library on your phone runs through iCloud. Your photos go up to Apple's servers, and once you pass the free storage, that becomes a monthly bill. Getting your own music onto your iPhone without a cable usually means a subscription too. And cloud storage, which most people expect to mean “move it off my device”, ends up meaning “keep a copy on every device that has room.”
That's how a cloud business works. For a library you already own, we think it's a bad deal: seeing your own library on your own devices in your own house has quietly turned into a service you rent.
Raza Photos and Raza Songs take the other route. Your Mac already has the files, and your phone is already in the same house. We just connect the two, with no cloud in between.
Where your library actually lives
When you use Raza Photos or Raza Songs, 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
- ✓No subscription, ever
- ✓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 price: backup is your job
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.
It's a small price for keeping your library, and a plan that takes half an hour covers it.
That said, good backup solutions for local libraries are straightforward and many are either free or already included with your Mac. Here's a simple plan →
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 Songs 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 organizational 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.
Why the home network
Before clouds and accounts, your home network was the whole system: your computers, your files, your walls. We moved to servers and sign-ins for good reasons. Reaching your files from anywhere, safely, is hard, and the cloud made it easy. But it also made a simple case, seeing your own library on your own devices in your own house, depend on someone else's infrastructure.
We think the home network should be enough for that case. Left alone, it isn't: whatever is on a home network is visible to everything else on it. So the apps do the work that makes it safe. They open no ports to the internet, create no accounts to leak, announce your library over Bonjour, which by design never leaves your local network, and give you read-only controls for the people you share a house with. The goal is the convenience of a cloud service, inside a boundary you can see and draw yourself.
The catches, stated once: anyone on your main Wi-Fi can browse the library, your Mac has to be on, and backups are yours. The full security model →