The idea
Pick a point — your location, an address, or a tap on the map — and a radius from 100 m to 20 km. RetroSpot answers: “Been here before, N different years!”, with a pill for each year and, for every visit, the route reconstructed in the order the photos were taken.
Private by design
Your photo library is never sent to a Kinevia server. Maps, addresses, and nearby places go through Apple's own services (MapKit, CoreLocation). Remote servers (Immich, PhotoPrism, WebDAV…) are sources you choose and host — all off by default.
Privacy
RetroSpot has no account and no server of its own. It never phones home, and ships no analytics, no ads, no third-party SDKs.
Features
Every photo opens onto a full detail view, and the app fills in the gaps itself: estimated positions, a reminder widget, Siri shortcuts.
Search
Suggestions as you type, radius auto-expanded for a broad place (a city, a neighborhood), just like Photos' place-name search.
Results
Clickable pills per year, then the dated thumbnails for each year — plus albums (including shared ones) whose title matches.
Route
For each visit (photos from the same year less than 6 h apart), the route linking the photos in shooting order is drawn on the map.
Photo detail
Non-destructive rotation, zoom up to 5×, technical info (device, lens, focal length, ISO…), address via reverse geocoding, nearby places.
No location
Photos without GPS get an estimated position (≈ badge); “Edit location” writes real metadata, just like “Assign a Location” in Photos.
Sharing
Photo, date, place, address, GPS coordinates, and Maps / Google Maps / directions links, ready to send.
Widget
iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch: photos taken here N years ago, at a glance, synced to the Watch over WatchConnectivity.
Voice
“Find photos near me” — available in French, English, Japanese, Italian, Spanish and Arabic.
Videos
Searchable by place and year just like photos; GPS position can also be written into videos from a folder source.
Explorer
Two independent panels — library, folder, or server, one per side — with a year-range slider and automatic grouping by sub-folder. Drag a photo from one panel to the other to copy or move it.
Languages
Menus, help, widget and notifications are translated into 32 languages — including right-to-left Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. RetroSpot opens in your phone’s language, and you can switch to any other from Settings, instantly.
Sources
Beyond your photo library and local folders, RetroSpot can talk to most self-hosted photo servers — each opt-in, off by default, added with its own credentials stored in the Keychain.
PhotoKit — the whole library, including shared iCloud albums. Rotation and position are editable.
One or more chosen folders, EXIF read directly (ImageIO). GPS position is writable, including in videos.
API key. Upload, deletion (trash), filter by recognized person.
App password. Upload, deletion (archive), filter by person.
End-to-end encrypted — RetroSpot decrypts locally with your password, never on the server. Uploads are encrypted client-side too.
Nextcloud, ownCloud, any WebDAV server. RetroSpot does its own EXIF extraction. Upload and deletion (moved to a .trash folder — no native trash on this protocol) supported.
Any SSH server (NAS, VPS…), via swift-nio-ssh. Upload and deletion (moved to a .trash folder) supported.
NewDeletion and upload supported (upload needs an Administrator account on Piwigo). GPS position read photo by photo — first scan is slower on a large gallery.
NewGraphQL API. Read-only — Photoview exposes neither upload nor deletion.
NewDeletion and upload supported (needs uploads enabled server-side). The image shown is a large server-generated preview, not the original file.
NewRecursive search across the whole library. Upload supported if enabled server-side; no deletion API on the server side.
New