Folio
Every Photo. Every Gallery. One App.
Browse, manage, and back up your entire SmugMug library—natively on your Mac.
macOS 13.0+ · Apple Silicon (M1+)
Your Library,
Your Way
Your entire SmugMug account loads as a native folder tree. Click any gallery to see thumbnails in grid or masonry layout—click any photo to open a full-screen lightbox with zoom, pan, and keyboard navigation. Videos play inline with native macOS controls.
- Create, rename, and organize galleries and folders
- Full gallery settings: privacy, sorting, watermarks, and more
- Copy web URLs and share links for any gallery or image
- Breadcrumb navigation and adjustable thumbnail sizing
- Plan-aware interface adapts to your SmugMug subscription
Step-by-step walkthrough
Upload, Organize,
and Control
Upload photos and videos from Finder or import directly from your macOS Photos Library—iCloud files download automatically. The upload engine processes files sequentially with pause, resume, and stop controls. Uploaded photos appear instantly as local placeholders while SmugMug processes the originals.
- Set up watched folders that auto-upload new files
- Upload entire folders and preserve their structure
- Duplicate detection by filename and content hash
- Select multiple images to download or delete as a batch
- Detailed upload and download reports per album
Files, Photos library, and watched folders
Stop building galleries one at a time
After a busy season you might need 50+ galleries across a dozen folders — each with its own privacy settings and upload links. That’s an afternoon of clicking. Folio does it from a spreadsheet.
| Folder 1 | Folder 2 | Gallery | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fall 2026 | Martinez Wedding | Ceremony |
| 2 | Fall 2026 | Martinez Wedding | Reception |
| 3 | Fall 2026 | Martinez Wedding | Portraits |
| 4 | Fall 2026 | Kim-Patel Wedding | Ceremony |
| 5 | Fall 2026 | Kim-Patel Wedding | Reception |
| 6 | Fall 2026 | Corporate Gala | Awards |
| + 41 more rows | |||
Privacy settings, guest upload links, and gallery sorting — all configured from the same file.
Find Anything.
Tag Everything.
Search across your entire library by filename, title, caption, or keywords. Results appear grouped by gallery with file type breakdowns and direct download. Open the info panel to edit titles, captions, keywords, and GPS coordinates—see locations on an interactive map alongside full EXIF data.
- AI auto-tagging and auto-captioning with Apple Intelligence or Claude Vision
- Batch-tag an entire gallery or process photos individually
- Edit metadata and GPS coordinates with an interactive map
- Generate sidecar text files to preserve metadata alongside originals
- Download images directly from search results
Auto-tagging, captioning, and privacy
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Headshots
Complete Backups,
Zero Hassle.
Download albums or your entire library. Folder hierarchy preserved on disk.
Downloading Guide- Smart Resume
- Pause, resume, pick up where you left off. Every file verified with SHA-256 checksums.
- Concurrent Downloads
- Up to 3 files download simultaneously with built-in rate limiting that respects SmugMug's API.
- Full Video Support
- Videos up to 3 GB with extended timeouts and smart endpoint selection for the highest quality source.
- Detailed Reports
- Per-album breakdown after every session: files downloaded, skipped, or failed.
All credentials in macOS Keychain. No analytics. No telemetry. AI runs on your Mac.
Bring Everything With You
Migrate your entire photo library from Google Photos or Flickr to SmugMug. Albums, metadata, and all—transferred automatically.
Google Photos and Flickr walkthrough
2,847 photos · 46 albums
Google Photos
Export
Download your library with Google Takeout
Select
Point Folio at the extracted folder
Migrate
Albums, metadata, and photos transfer automatically
Flickr
Authorize
Grant Folio read-only access to your account
Preview
Review the full folder tree before anything transfers
Transfer
Collections, albums, titles, captions, and tags — all preserved
A Love Letter to Indie Development
I've always been someone who thinks in both pictures and logic. Photography is my passion, but I've always had a foot in the world of code too. So when I found myself frustrated by the lack of a truly great native Mac app for managing my SmugMug portfolio, I didn't just wish someone would build one — I decided to build it myself.
That app is Folio.
A Dream Worth Chasing
For years, I managed my photography on SmugMug. It's a fantastic platform for hosting and selling photos, but the tools for managing a large library from the desktop always felt like an afterthought. I wanted something elegant. Something that felt native to my Mac. Something that treated my photos with the same care I put into taking them.
I knew I could code. What I didn't know was Swift, SwiftUI, the intricacies of macOS development, or the deep, sometimes maddening particulars of the SmugMug API. But I had a clear vision of what I wanted to build, and I was determined to get there.
Every one of these discoveries cost me hours. And every one of them made me sharper.
Diving Into the Deep End
Building a full native macOS app was a different beast entirely. Swift has its own philosophy — protocols, actors, value types, a concurrency model that rewards you when you understand it and punishes you when you don't. SwiftUI on macOS is powerful but full of surprises: scroll views that swallow gestures, photo pickers that refuse to work inside menus, and state management that will silently show you stale data if you key your ForEach the wrong way.
And then there was the SmugMug API. I spent countless evenings learning its personality. Fields that look like booleans sometimes come back as strings. Forget a single query parameter and your thumbnails arrive the size of postage stamps. Send a boolean as a string in a PATCH request and the API just… ignores you. Silently. No error. No hint.
Growing With the Help of AI
I built Folio during a time when large language models became genuinely useful development partners, and I leaned into that fully. They helped me understand Swift patterns I hadn't encountered before, debug OAuth signature failures at midnight, and navigate the labyrinth of Apple's code signing and notarization process.
But here's what people don't tell you about building with AI assistance: it doesn't build your app for you. It accelerates your learning. Every suggestion I received, I had to evaluate and understand. Every architectural decision, I had to own. An LLM could explain what an actor-based API client was, but I had to decide that was the right pattern for my networking layer. It could show me how SwiftUI state management works, but I had to figure out — through a very frustrating weekend — why my gallery grid was showing the wrong thumbnails after a data refresh.
Over months of building, I grew enormously as a developer. I went from someone who could code to someone who thinks in architectural patterns, who anticipates edge cases instinctively, who feels genuine satisfaction when a complex upload pipeline works flawlessly on the first try.
What Folio Became
Today, Folio is a fully native macOS app built with SwiftUI. It has a dark, cinematic interface designed to treat photography with the reverence it deserves. You can browse your entire SmugMug library in a fluid sidebar, manage gallery settings down to every detail, upload photos with drag-and-drop simplicity, and even migrate entire libraries from Google Takeout or Flickr.
Under the hood, it handles things that once seemed impossibly complex to me: OAuth authentication with HMAC-SHA1 signatures, multi-tier image caching with disk and memory layers, parallel downloads, sequential uploads tuned to SmugMug's rate limits, iCloud photo integration, Apple's full notarization pipeline, and automatic updates through Sparkle.
Every feature represents a wall I hit and climbed over. Every edge case handled is a lesson learned the hard way.
The Indie Spirit
There's something deeply personal about shipping software as a solo indie developer. Every pixel, every animation, every error message — it all came through my hands. There's no product manager deciding the roadmap, no committee debating button placement. When a user requests a feature, I can build it that evening. When something breaks, it's on me.
Folio isn't backed by venture capital. It doesn't have a growth team or a marketing department. It's one photographer-developer who believed his photos deserved a better home on his desktop — and had the stubborn determination to make it happen.
Countless side projects die in obscurity, but Folio is signed, notarized, and in the hands of real photographers managing real portfolios.
What I'm Proud Of
I'm proud of how much I grew. I went from knowing little about Apple's ecosystem to building an app with actors, async/await, complex caching strategies, a full OAuth implementation, and a migration engine that can pull entire libraries across platforms.
I'm proud that I persisted. There were nights when nothing worked — when the API returned cryptic errors, when macOS SwiftUI did something inexplicable, when code signing rejected my build for the tenth time. Each time, I came back the next day.
Most of all, I'm proud that the app I built is the app I dreamed of. Not a compromise, not a “good enough.” The actual thing I envisioned when I first thought, someone should make this.
— Tomasz Nowicki
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macOS 13.0+ · Apple Silicon · Up to 3 Macs · Changelog
Yes. Export your Google Photos library with Google Takeout, point Folio at the extracted folder, and it migrates everything to SmugMug. Album structure is preserved, oversized albums are auto-split, and you can pause and resume at any time. See the migration guide for a full walkthrough.
Yes. Authorize Folio with read-only access to your Flickr account and it transfers your entire library — collections become folders, albums become galleries, and all titles, captions, and tags are preserved. No manual downloads needed. See the migration guide for details.
You'll need to create an API key from your SmugMug account settings. Our step-by-step setup guide walks you through the entire process.
Absolutely. Folio includes everything the old SmugMug Downloader could do and much more. Download individual albums or back up your entire account with smart resume, concurrent downloads, and SHA-256 verification. See the downloading and backup guides for details.
Yes. Folio stores your credentials in the macOS Keychain and communicates directly with SmugMug's servers. No data passes through any third-party servers. Read our full privacy policy for details.
Looking for the original SmugMug Downloader? Download here (Apple Silicon) · Privacy Policy
Folio is an independent project, not affiliated with SmugMug, Inc.