AI photo app. Zero uploads.
For AI to judge your photos, it has to look at all of them. Most apps do that looking on a server, which means your entire library gets uploaded. SpectraSort does it on your iPhone's Neural Engine instead. Nothing leaves the phone.
The questions to ask any AI photo app
- Where does the AI run? “In the cloud” means your photos travel. “On-device” means they don't.
- Is there an account? An account is a database row with your name on it. If there's no account, there's nothing to breach.
- Are your photos used for training? If they're uploaded, read the terms twice.
- Does the privacy claim match the App Privacy label? The label is part of the store listing; a marketing page can say anything.
SpectraSort's answers: on-device, no account, never trained on, and the label agrees.
There's no server to trust.
SpectraSort indexes, searches and scores on the iPhone's Neural Engine, and your taste profile is built and stored on the device. No SpectraSort server ever handles your photos, so there's no privacy promise you have to take on faith.
The models ship pre-trained and don't learn from users' photos. The developer has no way to see your photo content, and Apple's App Privacy label on the listing says the same thing.
A side effect worth knowing: sorting doesn't need a connection, because the whole pipeline is local.
The one network feature
The app has optional anonymous usage analytics, using Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics. What it sends are events like “sort started” and crash reports, never photo content and never locations. It's opt-in, defaults to off in the EU, UK and EEA, and can be switched off anywhere in Settings → Privacy.
That's the entire network footprint.
What else you get out of on-device
- No account. Download it and sort.
- No connection needed. The sorting pipeline runs locally, on a plane or in a dead zone.
- No subscription. There are no server costs to pass on to you monthly. Five sorts a week are free, and $19.99 once removes the cap.
- Speed. The index is built once, at up to 100 photos a second on recent iPhones, and every later sort runs against it.
- On-device also means the work happens on your chip, so newer iPhones index noticeably faster than older ones.
- iPhone only, iOS 18.5 or later. No iPad, Android or desktop version.
- The first index of a big library takes a while. It only happens once.
- Deleted photos spend 30 days in iOS's Recently Deleted album, so the storage comes back later, not right away. SpectraSort doesn't show a “GB freed” number because it would be a guess.
Free to try. $19.99 once to keep.
Five sorts a week are free, forever, with no account and no credit card. Premium is a single $19.99 purchase that removes the cap and unlocks Studio. No subscription, ever. Built by an indie dev who uses it daily.
Download on the App Store