For photographers with more archive than they can remember

Search every drive
like one archive.

Nevervault makes a scattered RAW and video archive searchable on your Mac. Externals, NAS shares, decades of folders: describe the frame you remember and it's there. No catalog. No import. Nothing moved or touched.

Download for macOS See how it works

macOS 14+ · Apple silicon · 14-day free trial, no card · Also coming to the Mac App Store

red dress on the beach, golden hour|
Searching Studio NAS T7 Shield 2019 Backup · unplugged, previews still searchable
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Read-only over your originals On-device & offline Nothing uploaded, no account Built for Apple silicon

Why it exists

Your archive should never become a vault.

Years of work can disappear without ever being deleted. A shoot gets backed up to an old drive. A client folder is copied twice. A Lightroom catalog points at part of the job. The NAS holds everything, and finding anything means digging through dates, folders, and guesses.

The files are safe. They're just buried. Nevervault keeps every drive, every shoot, every frame in reach.

One index

Every drive, one view.

External drives, SSDs, local folders, and NAS shares become one searchable index. Nevervault doesn't ask you to reorganize a decade of work before it becomes useful. Connect the archive you already have and search it like it was always one library.

Unplug a drive and its previews stay searchable. Plug it back in and Nevervault reconnects it on its own.

Studio NAS
412,806 photos · online
T7 Shield
88,110 photos · online
2019 Backup
191,437 photos · unplugged, previews kept
One search across all three

Light by design

Built for RAW archives.

Huge RAW files, video clips, sidecars, exports, and duplicate folders: this is what Nevervault is designed around. It indexes with tiny previews and metadata instead of copying your archive into another bloated library.

Terabytes of originals stay exactly where they are. What lives on your Mac is measured in gigabytes.

Your originals
Terabytes, untouched, on their drives
What Nevervault stores
Tiny previews + a search index, on your Mac

Set a storage ceiling and Nevervault stays under it. Clear previews for any folder whenever you want the space back.

Signal, not noise

Clean stacks, fewer duplicates.

A burst of forty frames is one moment, not forty results. Nevervault groups near-identical frames into visual stacks and collapses exact duplicates, so a thousand-shot day reads as the day.

Nothing is hidden for good and nothing is deleted. Every frame stays one click inside its stack, and you choose how aggressive grouping is.

40 frames One result

Motion & sound

Your footage is searchable too.

Nevervault indexes the frames inside your clips, not just a thumbnail. Describe the shot the way you'd describe a photo and jump straight to it in the footage.

Switch on transcription and it reads the spoken words, too, entirely on your Mac. A documentary cut, a season of athlete interviews, hours of sideline audio: search it by what was said, then tap a word to land on that exact second of the clip.

Made for archives that are mostly footage. The audio never leaves your machine.

A7S3_0142.mov 04:12
“…and that’s when the whole season turned around.” 02:47

Find a frame or a phrase, jump to the exact second

Into your workflow

Preview fast. Open anywhere.

Browse results in a fast built-in viewer, flip through a stack, then send the original straight to Camera Raw, Photoshop, or Lightroom with one shortcut.

Nevervault is not here to replace your editor. It sits before your tools, across everything, and gets you to the right file faster.

Open in Photoshop ⌘R Reveal in Finder Open Folder

The original file, in your editor. Nevervault never makes a copy.

Gather your selects

Collections, across every drive.

Pull the keepers from anywhere in your archive into one place. Command-click to select across drives and folders, then add to a collection in a single step. It's just references, never copies, so it costs nothing and can be any size.

Curate on a plane with no drives attached once they're indexed, then export every original in a collection to a folder you choose, in one action, straight off the drives.

Coastal — final selects 128 photos
Export originals Add selection

References across every drive, exported wherever you need them.

How it works

Three steps. Then it's just there.

01

Point it at a drive

Pick a folder, an external, or a NAS share. No import, no catalog to build, nothing to reorganize first.

02

It indexes, read-only

Tiny previews and an on-device search index build in the background. You can start searching while it works.

03

Describe what you want

Search your whole archive in plain words. Open the original, reveal it in Finder, or jump to its folder.

Privacy

Local-first by design.

Your files should not need to be uploaded to someone else's cloud just to become searchable.

Everything on your Mac

Indexing and search run on-device, tuned for Apple silicon. No accounts, no analytics, and drives work fully offline. Nothing you own is ever uploaded.

Read-only, always

Nevervault opens your originals read-only. It cannot move, rename, convert, or delete a file. Your archive is never restructured.

Yours to control

No telemetry. The previews and index live on your Mac, capped by a storage limit you set, and you can clear them anytime.

Why I built this

I'm a photographer. Somewhere across a NAS and a shelf of drives I have a few hundred thousand RAW files: a decade of shoots, travel, events, work I was proud of and forgot I had.

When I wanted a specific frame, I had nothing. Lightroom buckled at that scale. Photos refused to index a network drive. Everything else wanted me to import, to copy and rebuild my whole archive just to look through it.

So I built the tool I wanted: point it at the drive, leave every file exactly where it is, and search the whole thing by describing what I remember. Nevervault is that, hardened until I trusted it with my own originals. I hope it finds your work for you too.

Zachary Owens
Photographer & developer · Sacramento, CA
@zacheowens
Zachary Owens, the photographer who built Nevervault

Pricing

Try everything for 14 days.

Start with a 14-day trial of the full app, no card. After that, Nevervault stays useful free: your library remains fully indexed and you get 20 searches a month. Go Pro whenever you want more.

Monthly
$9.99 / month

Month-to-month. Cancel anytime.

Choose monthly

macOS 14+ · Apple silicon

  • Unlimited plain-English search
  • Search inside your video
  • Search the spoken words in your video
  • Advanced filters: camera, lens, format
  • Collections: gather selects, export originals
  • Every drive, indexed read-only
  • On-device & fully private
Best value
Yearly
$99.99 / year

That's $8.33 a month. Two months free.

Choose yearly

macOS 14+ · Apple silicon

  • Unlimited plain-English search
  • Search inside your video
  • Search the spoken words in your video
  • Advanced filters: camera, lens, format
  • Collections: gather selects, export originals
  • Every drive, indexed read-only
  • On-device & fully private

Indexing and browsing are never capped, on any plan. Pro adds unlimited search, video indexing, and advanced filters.

Questions, answered

Does Nevervault change my photos?

No. Nevervault opens your originals read-only. It cannot move, rename, convert, or delete anything. It only stores its own tiny previews and search index on your Mac.

Do I need Lightroom or a catalog?

No. Nevervault works directly on your folders of RAW files, wherever they live. There is nothing to import and no catalog to maintain. It sits before your editor, not in place of it.

Where do my photos go? Is anything uploaded?

Nothing is ever uploaded. Indexing and search run on your Mac, and drives work fully offline. The one optional network feature is your own iCloud Photo Library: Nevervault can download from your iCloud (never upload) to index it, and you can turn that off.

Does it really search video?

Yes, two ways. Nevervault indexes the frames inside your clips, so footage is searchable the same way your stills are. Turn on transcription and it also searches the spoken words, entirely on your Mac, so interviews, commentary, and documentary audio become searchable by what was said. Tap a word to jump to that second of the clip.

What happens when the trial ends?

Nevervault stays useful free. Your library remains fully indexed and browsable, and you get 20 searches a month showing the top matches. Pro removes the search limits and adds video search, spoken-word transcription, advanced filters, any sort order, and collections.

What do I need to run it?

A Mac with Apple silicon on macOS 14 or later. Nevervault is tuned for the Neural Engine, which is what keeps search fast across huge archives.

Never lose a frame
to storage again.

Old drives shouldn't be graveyards, and your best work shouldn't depend on remembering a folder name from four years ago.

Download formacOS

macOS 14+ · Apple silicon · 14-day free trial, no card