PrivateMedia

PrivateMedia is a private photo and video library for your Mac. The photos you would rather not have sitting in a cloud album - documents, family pictures, anything personal - live here instead: encrypted on your own disk, behind one password, visible only while the app is open.

No account, no sync, no server. Nothing is uploaded, nothing phones home, and the app works exactly the same with the Wi-Fi off. Lock it and the key leaves memory - a locked vault on disk is just a folder of unreadable files.

Highlights

1. One password locks everything - your password wraps the encryption key for the whole library. Photos, videos, thumbnails and the index itself are all encrypted before anything touches the disk.
2. Import in one drop - add single files or point it at a whole folder. Duplicates already in the vault are skipped automatically, so re-importing the same camera dump costs you nothing.
3. Erase the originals if you want - an optional pass overwrites and removes each source file after it is safely inside, so the plain copy does not linger in Downloads.
4. A real library, not a locked box - a month-by-month timeline you can scrub through by year, plus search, albums, tags, favorites, star ratings and captions.
5. Photos and videos together - JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, TIFF and GIF alongside MP4, MOV, M4V, AVI, MKV and WebM, each playing straight from the vault.
6. Locks itself when you walk away - pick an idle timeout from a minute to an hour, or lock instantly with a keystroke. Three wrong passwords and the gate pauses before it will try again.
7. Archive and trash that behave - move things out of the timeline without deleting them, and keep a trash you have to empty on purpose.
8. Take a copy out whenever you like - export any photo or video as an ordinary decrypted file. Your library is never held hostage by the app.
9. Change your password instantly - only the wrapped key is rewritten, so it takes the same moment whether the vault holds fifty photos or fifty thousand.
10. Light and dark - a native Mac window that stays out of the way of the pictures.

How it works

The first time you open PrivateMedia it asks you to set a password. That password derives the key your library is encrypted with, so it is worth choosing something you will not forget - there is no reset link and no backup key, and nobody, including us, can open the vault without it. The app says so plainly before it lets you continue.

After that it is an ordinary photo app. Add photos or a folder, and each file is hashed, thumbnailed and encrypted on its way in. Browse the timeline, make albums, mark favorites, and close the window when you are done. Reopening asks for the password again, every time.

Perfect for

1. Anyone keeping personal photos off iCloud and Google Photos.
2. Passports, IDs, contracts and screenshots of things you should not leave in Downloads.
3. Shared or family Macs where one login does not mean one set of eyes.
4. Journalists, lawyers and anyone handling pictures that belong to someone else.
5. People who simply want their library on their own disk, working offline.