No authentication — and why
Neither Raza Photos nor Raza Music requires a password or login to browse your library. This is a conscious design decision, not an oversight.
The goal is to make your library feel like it is simply there — on your iPhone, on your iPad, in the house — the same way music plays on every HomePod without you logging in. Introducing a password would add friction for every family member, every time, on every device. For most households, that tradeoff is not worth it.
Instead, the network itself is the boundary. Access to your library requires physical access to your home Wi-Fi network. That is the same boundary that governs every other device in your house.
Your home network is already a trusted perimeter. Our apps treat it as one, rather than adding a second perimeter on top of it.
Not reachable from the internet
The library is only discoverable and accessible within your local network. Both apps use Bonjour for discovery — a local network protocol that does not traverse the internet and cannot be accessed from outside your router.
There is no port forwarding required, no dynamic DNS, no VPN endpoint, no relay server. There is simply nothing listening for incoming connections from the outside world. An attacker on the internet cannot reach your library because there is no route to it.
Your library has no internet-facing attack surface. It cannot be accessed remotely, cannot be found by scanners, and cannot be breached from outside your home.
Guest networks are fully isolated
Most modern routers support a separate guest Wi-Fi network. Devices on the guest network are isolated from devices on your main network — they can reach the internet but cannot talk to your Mac, your NAS, your printer, or anything else on your home network.
Bonjour discovery only works within a single network segment. A device on your guest network cannot discover or connect to a library server on your main network. This is not a feature we built — it is how network segmentation works at the router level.
The honest caveat: anyone on your main network can see your library
We said the home network is the boundary, and that cuts both ways. Anyone who connects to your main Wi-Fi and installs the app will automatically discover the library and be able to browse it — with no further step required.
For most families, this is exactly what they want. For others — households with flatmates, frequent guests given the main password, or simply families who want finer control — this is worth being aware of.
If you share your main Wi-Fi password with people you would not want browsing your library, consider using your router's guest network for visitors instead. Guest network isolation will do the rest.
Family controls — three levels of access
Browsing is one thing. Editing metadata is another. Both Raza Photos and Raza Music give you three distinct controls over what remote devices can do, without passwords, accounts, or per-user setup.
Lock the Mac server entirely. Every device on the network — every iPhone, iPad, or other Mac — can browse the full library but cannot make any changes whatsoever. The setting lives on the Mac. No cooperation from the remote device required.
Best for: families where one person curates the library and everyone else is a viewer.
Remote devices can browse freely — filtering, searching, viewing photos on the map, opening bursts — but metadata editing is disabled. No changing dates, locations, albums, or people tags from iOS. The Mac can still edit locally.
Best for: households that want full browsing from anywhere in the house but want to keep library organisation tidy.
Set a specific iPhone or iPad to read-only mode on the device itself. That device becomes a pure viewer — editing controls are hidden entirely in the UI, regardless of what the server allows. Useful when you want to hand a device to a child or guest without worrying about accidental changes.
Best for: kids' devices, or shared iPads used for browsing only.
A family can run a read-only server for day-to-day browsing, and temporarily disable it when the parent wants to do an organisation session from their iPhone on the couch. One toggle, no reconfiguration.
Summary
Raza Photos and Raza Music are secure against external threats — the internet, guest networks, remote attackers. They are open within your trusted home network, by design. If everyone on your main Wi-Fi is someone you trust with your library, you need to do nothing. If not, guest network isolation and the read-only setting give you the tools to draw that boundary yourself.