PicArrange
Available on the App Store for macOS 10.15 and later.
Key Features
Visual Sorting and Search: View images in a multi-column list with similar images placed together. Drag images into the search area to find similar ones. Quickly locate duplicate images. Describe the images you are searching with text or specify a color.
Image Browsing, Operations, and Presentation: Merge images from multiple folders into a single sorted list. Delete, copy, move, rename, and tag images. View images in full screen or start a slideshow.
Flexible Sorting, Image Filters: Sort by visual similarity, color, date, file name, size, aspect ratio, metadata, or manually. Filter large lists according to criteria such as file name, size and date.
Supported Formats and Image Export: Display all macOS-supported image formats, including videos, raw image formats, and PDF. Export the generated sorted arrangements.
How to Use PicArrange?
- Select an image folder of your choice to start using PicArrange.
- The images will be analyzed and displayed, sorted by their visual similarity.
- Choose from various display options, including sorting by color and content, size, name, date, aspect ratio, metadata, or your own custom order.
- Search for similar images by dropping an example image into the search box on the upper left.
- Alternatively, describe the images you're searching for using text in the search box or select a color.
- Use various viewing, organization, and filtering options.
For more information, refer to the detailed user guide:
How Does PicArrange Work?
- Image Analysis: When an image is opened by PicArrange for the first time, its visual content is analyzed, and feature vectors are calculated to describe its visual appearance and content.
- Image Arrangement: PicArrange employs the highly optimized Fast Linear Assignment Sorting (FLAS) algorithm to arrange images on a grid based on their visual similarity.
- Similarity Search: Images are sorted by the distance of their feature vectors to the feature vector of a query image.
- Persistence and Privacy: Image analysis is performed locally on your computer. No images or derived information are sent to any server. The calculated feature vectors are stored locally, and only new or modified images need to be reanalyzed.
Frequently Asked Questions
PicArrange displays images contained in your file system, similar to the Finder. For images contained in your photo library, please use our iOS/macOS app Kiano.
PicArrange can only open one root folder at a time. Open 'Macintosh HD' and expand the 'Volumes' folder in the directory tree. There, you can select multiple connected USB and network drives or their subfolders simultaneously. To do this, click on each folder name while holding down the command key.
PicArrange manages up to seven different tags, which can be customized in Settings -> Tags. Enter the string 'Animal' in the field next to the keyboard shortcut ⌘ 1. PicArrange will now mark all images with this tag using a red circle. You can set or remove this tag for any image by using ⌘ 1.
Comments
How do you perform a textual search. When I click the image search box at the top left of the screen, the tab switches from 'search for images that look similar' tab to the tab for 'search for images taken near this location'. What am i missing?
Thanks for your comment. It seems that you’re using an Intel-based Mac. Text-based image search is only available on Macs with Apple M-series processors.
The ability to enter search text on Intel Macs is a bug and will be fixed in an upcoming version.
I have the latest version of PicArrange (3.4.1)and am running MacOS 15.5 but do not have the icon at the bottom of the interface between the MetaData and Search icons that will allow me to find duplicates as shown in the video tutorial.
Please advise.
Otherwise I love this app!
Thank you for your feedback and for using PicArrange – we’re glad to hear you enjoy the app!
Regarding the “Find Duplicates” feature: this functionality is only available on Macs with Apple Silicon running macOS 12 or later, as it relies on neural network technology that is supported exclusively on Apple Silicon. If you are using a Mac with an Intel processor, this feature will not appear in the interface.
I have been looking for something like this for ages. I don't know how it took me so long! What a wonderful, useful program this has been for me. Thank you!
Let me start by saying I have zero understanding of how things are working under the hood in this program, so I have no idea if these are reasonable requests 😅
I use the image description search pretty regularly, but there are some items that it just doesn't seem to understand yet; Most of them are related to the custom machinery we use and make. Is there any way to train PicArrange to help it recognize the images/items?
Second, is there any way to edit/save metadata? I would love to be able to save some of the keywords or descriptions to meta tags (custom or otherwise), or at least bulk add my own metadata to images that get grouped together by the similarity search. For example, I have had MANY people working with the images in a library I inherited, and the naming conventions have been... inconsistent. If I could grab all pictures showing, say, a logo, and slap a logo tag on them, it would make it easier for me and my colleagues to deal with the library.
Thanks so much for the positive feedback on PicArrange! We’re really glad people are enjoying the app. As it’s mainly a research demo, it’s tough to get visibility without big marketing budgets.
On the tech side: PicArrange uses a neural network tuned for the best balance between search speed and accuracy. We could push for higher accuracy, but that would slow things down quite a bit. Future versions may manage both better speed and precision. For now, it’s not possible to train the app to recognize specific objects yourself — that’s beyond the current design.
Your second question is a great idea for the future. Adding true custom tags (beyond the standard tags mentioned in our FAQ) would require a major overhaul, but there’s a possible workaround that could be impemented in a future version. PicArrange works by creating a visual descriptor for an image and a text descriptor for a search query. We could let users manually assign their own custom text descriptors to images. This new approach offers two options: First, after a text search, users could select specific resulting images and assign the query's text descriptor to them. Second, users could simply manually select images and assign the text descriptor of a custom phrase to them. This ensures those "tagged" pictures are reliably retrieved later, making it an exciting idea for future development of PicArrange.
I have been using PicArrange for quite a while. I love it. It is indispensable!
Are there any plans to add features like being able to 'pin' multiple directories, and then have their analyses and image caches persist between launches?
I often look at 10-30K images, and having some persistent sort of 'catalogs' would make picarrange even much more useful!
Thank you,
Joe
Hi Joe,
thank you for your kind words — we’re glad PicArrange is useful for you!
PicArrange does already store its analysis data to make results persistent. When you relaunch the app, it quickly scans the selected folders and their subfolders to check each image’s modification date. If any images have changed, they’re re-analysed; depending on the number of folders and images, this check can take some time.
The image cache itself is only kept in memory and is not written permanently to disk, as we don’t want to store thumbnails on your file system.
If your “catalogues” are in different root folders, you can use File → Open… to open each root folder. PicArrange remembers which subfolders were selected for each root folder, and you can switch between them quickly via File → Open Recent.
PicArange seems to be a good way to find duplicate images.
How do I delete duplicates?
It found 1800 duplicates from this dump of Google Photos, which has 17598 images in it.
Manually selecting duplicate images is going to take a while...
Thank you for your feedback!
At the moment, duplicates can only be deleted manually. For each group of detected duplicates, select all the images you don’t want to keep (hold the Command key while clicking each image), then click the trash icon in the lower-left corner to delete them.
Within each duplicate group, PicArrange sorts images by modification date to make it easier to choose which one to keep. Please note that images with different pixel sizes but otherwise very similar content may also be flagged as duplicates.
Super App - seit dem Ende von Picasa das mit Abstand Beste, was vom Handling, Geschwindigkeit und Trefferquote bei umfangreicher Anzahl an Bildern zu finden ist. Ich verwalte damit weit über 500.000 Bilder (auf 1200Px verkleinert)...und ich muss sagen, es funktioniert. Auf neue Bilder wird bei jedem Start geprüft. Das dauert zwar bei mir reichlich 45 Sekunden, aber wenn man weiß, was das bedeutet und worin dabei der Vorteil liegt ist das absolut in Ordnung.
Die Bilder sind auf über 2000 Ordner verteilt. Das Scrollen in der Thumbsansicht funktioniert über Ordner hinweg...flüssig. Ich bin beeindruckt über die Ergebnisse der Bildersuche. So finde ich auch längst vergessene Bilder.
Toll wäre, wenn man auch in der Vollbildansicht weiter mit dem Mausrad durch die Bilder scrollen könnte.
Absolut empfehlenswert!
Thank you very much for releasing such a wonderful app.
I have a feature request: I would greatly appreciate it if you could add an option to display two screens when using the Show (Full Screen) mode. I understand that implementing a dual-screen feature would require various modifications and could be quite challenging, so please consider it only if you think it is feasible.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Would love to be able to open more than one window of the application at a time and perhaps a “favorites” filter toggle.
App is great
The implementation of multiple windows, similar to the Finder, would significantly change the software design of the application and would be quite complex. But thanks for the idea!
If you set the filter to show favorites, the filter button acts as a toggle. However, a keyboard shortcut is currently missing and will be added in the next version.
Thank you for your feedback! Help us to make PicArrange more popular by telling others about it :)
Amazing App. Thank you so much. Do you have any plans to add a waterfall view option (aka Masonry layout)? It would be a gamechanger and the only thing the app is missing. Thanks again. Wonderful product.
I am on macos 12, would this be a limitation to search by keyword as the option doesn't seem to be available?
Searching with text or keywords requires macOS 12 and the Apple Neural Engine, which is only available on Apple Silicon Chips (M1, M2, ...), but not on Intel Macs.
Great program that I have been looking for for more than a decade. It could be vastly improved if it could operate on a folder of folders of images.
Thank you very much for the great feedback.
If I have understood you correctly, what you want is already possible. If you check the box “Traverse Subfolders” (bottom left), all images in subfolders will be opened as well.
Will this sort black and white photos from darker to lighter?
Currently, you can use a white image for a similarity search, which sorts images by their closeness to it. However, the results are often not ideal. A dedicated color search might be added to PicArrange in a future version.
Update: As of version 3.4, PicArrange allows to find images with similar colors