Bring your photo memories home to Apple Photos
Bulk-import thousands of photos & videos from your NAS, external drives, or local folders into Apple Photos — reliably, pausably, without duplicates.
iCloudPhotonator is a free, open-source macOS app. Since it's not from the App Store, macOS will ask you to confirm on first launch.
Download the DMG file and open it.
Drag iCloudPhotonator to your Applications folder.
Right-click → Open → Click 'Open' in the dialog. Only needed once.
Grant Automation permission and start importing!
Most of us started taking digital photos in the early 2000s. Since then, tens of thousands of images have piled up — on NAS boxes, external hard drives, old laptops, forgotten folders on your Mac. These aren't just files. They're your children's first steps, family celebrations, the faces of people who are no longer with us. But they sit on aging hardware that could fail any day. An old hard drive in a drawer isn't a backup — it's a ticking countdown. Apple Photos changes everything: face recognition, location search, curated memories, available on every device. But getting 50,000 photos in there? That's where it gets painful.
Photos on NAS, external drives, old laptops — hard to find, easy to lose.
Hard drives fail. NAS boxes age. One day those memories are just… gone.
No face recognition, no location search, no curated memories. Your best photos are buried in a folder hierarchy nobody remembers.
Once your photos are in Apple Photos, they come alive. They're not just stored — they're searchable, organized, and available everywhere.
Find every photo of your daughter, your parents, your best friend — automatically, across decades of photos.
Browse your photos by location and date. Relive that trip to Italy or your kid's birthday — without remembering which folder it's in.
With iCloud, your entire library syncs across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Pull up any photo, anytime, from any device.
Whether your photos live on a Synology NAS, a USB drive, or scattered across folders on your Mac — iCloudPhotonator imports them all into Apple Photos safely, incrementally, and without losing a single file.
Import 10,000 to 100,000+ files in a single run.
Stop and continue anytime — never lose progress.
No duplicate imports, ever. Hash-based detection keeps your library clean.
Automatic escalation when Photos.app becomes unresponsive.
Full English and German UI — more languages welcome.
Tune batch sizes, cooldowns, and restart intervals to your hardware.
A five-stage pipeline that handles every edge case so you don't have to.
Every step is persisted in a local database. Crash? Restart? Network drop? Resume exactly where you left off.