Album Connect / iPhone · iPad · Mac

Your photos are only half the story.

Moving pictures between libraries is easy. Moving what tells you who the people in them are — the album and folder names that you painstakingly created — is the hard part, and it's the part every other solution drops.

(folder) 1980s (folder) 1985 (album) Jim Maloney and Betty Murphy’s wedding in Boise, Idaho The pictures are the easy part. It's this line — which decade, which year, whose wedding — that tells you what you're looking at, and it arrives on the other device exactly as you left it.

Coming to the App Store

The problem

Photographs move. What you know about them doesn't.

You may be the only person in the world who knows that this is Grandma Ruth graduating from Cal in 1948. You put that knowledge into album names and folders over years. Then you send a collection of pictures to your sister or son, and everything but the pixels falls off along the way.

Every other path has severe shortcomings.

Export to a folder Albums and folders are gone, and the names that said whose pictures these were go with them. You get files in a directory and the job of working it out again.
AirDrop the photos They land loose in the recipient's library, mixed into forty thousand other pictures, with nothing naming them and no album to find them by.
Shared albums & links Convenient for exactly one album, not hundreds.
Google Takeout A stack of ZIP files, album names buried in JSON sidecars, and dates that only come back if you do the work by hand.

What arrives intact

Everything that made it yours.

Album Connect packages a selection of your library — with its structure — into a portable .albumdrop package, and rebuilds it on the other side.

Folders & albumsThe whole hierarchy, at any depth, rebuilt as real folders and albums — on Mac, iPhone, and iPad alike.
Original qualityNothing is re-encoded, resized, or re-compressed. The bytes that arrive are the bytes that left.
Dates & timesCapture dates to the second, including the ones you corrected by hand, and video creation dates.
PlacesGPS coordinates travel with the photo, or stay behind if you'd rather they didn't.
EditsYour edited version arrives as the photo, with the untouched original alongside it.
Live PhotosStill and motion stay paired, so what arrives is a real Live Photo — not a flat still.
RAW companionsA RAW+JPEG pair travels as a pair, with the RAW file preserved beside its rendered image.
Captions & favouritesTitles, descriptions, keywords, and the hearts you gave things, all carried across.

How it works

Four steps, and you choose every one of them.

Prepare

Pick where the photos come from.

Apple Photos — choose albums and folders from your library.
Google Photos — choose photos and videos through Google's own Picker, signed in as you. Album Connect never sees your Google Photos library, only what you hand it.
A folder on disk — point at a directory and keep its structure. Mac
Google Takeout — turn whole exports, hundreds of albums at once, back into real albums. Mac

Store

It's an ordinary folder.

iCloud Drive — the default, and where another Album Connect user picks it up.
Google Drive — the route to anyone on Windows or Android, and where the web app's link comes from.

Hand it to whoever it is for.

Use the iOS or macOS folder sharing tools to share with friends and family.
Send the folder via AirDrop or on a USB stick.

Use

Open it on the other side and choose where it lands.

Apple Photos — albums and folders rebuilt, metadata intact.
Google Photos — signed in and uploaded from inside the app.
A folder on disk — the hierarchy written out as real directories. Mac
A Windows PC, Android phone, or Chromebook — through Google Photos, using the free web app in a browser. No Apple device needed at that end.

No size limit worth the name

A 100 GB collection never needs 100 GB free.

Most transfer tools have to build the whole thing before they can send any of it — so a big library needs its own size in free space on your device, and again on your recipient's.

An .albumdrop folder is written in parts of about a gigabyte in our fully streaming architecture, straight to iCloud or Google Drive, and each part is cleared once it has been sent. The free space you need is roughly one part plus the size of your largest video — not the size of the collection. Whole libraries move on an iPhone or Mac that has a few gigabytes to spare.

If a transfer is interrupted part-way, picking it up again adopts what already arrived instead of importing it twice.

While you're here

It will also tidy the library you already have.

Two tools that work on your own library, whether or not you ever move anything.

Time-based folders & albums

Build decade and year folders with quarter or month albums inside them, across your whole library, in one pass.

It uses the folders you already have rather than building rivals beside them — including years filed under a family name or any other level of your own.
Where a year is genuinely ambiguous, it stops and tells you which one, instead of guessing.
It can sweep strays into place, and it only ever moves things. Nothing is copied, deleted, or re-encoded.
Run it twice and the second run does nothing.

Not in any other album

Find the photos from a given year that never made it into an album, and collect them into one.

The forgotten middle of most libraries: imported once, never sorted, effectively invisible.
Run it, and what was loose is now somewhere you can actually work through.

Privacy

There is no Album Connect account, because there is no Album Connect server.

Your photographs are read on your device and written on your cloud account. Album Connect has nowhere to send them: no sign-up, no analytics, no telemetry, no server of ours anywhere in the picture.

The only accounts involved are the ones you already have. If you use iCloud, Google Drive, or Google Photos, the app talks directly to yours, asking for the narrowest permissions those services offer — and you can disconnect at any time.

Nothing is uploaded for processing. Nothing is scanned. There is no free tier funded by your library.

Built to outlast the app

A format that could still be read in twenty years or a hundred.

Family pictures outlive software. A package you make today should not depend on this app — or this company — still being here when it matters.

The format is archival quality. An .albumdrop is an ordinary folder of ordinary ZIP parts, and every one of your photos sits inside in its original file format at full resolution. A plain-text README.txt file explains how to recover the file in terms that a person or an AI can easily understand.

Alongside them is a plain-text manifest.json — a complete, human-readable table of contents listing every album, folder, and photo. Any programmer, and any decent text editor, can read it without this app existing.

Every file carries a SHA-256 checksum, and the package is verified when it's opened. Silent corruption gets caught rather than inherited.

Who buys this

Someone in every family ends up keeping the pictures.

If that person is you, everything you know about those photographs is currently trapped in your library.

You scanned the shoebox. You worked out which cousin is which, sorted it by decade and by branch of the family, and gave every album a name that nobody else could have supplied.

None of that survives a folder export or an AirDrop. Send your brother four thousand loose files and you have sent him the pictures while keeping the part that makes them legible — and when you are no longer around to ask, that knowledge is simply gone.

Album Connect sends the whole thing: the pictures, and the years of sorting that tell him who he is looking at.

Specific use cases include:

Leaving Google Photos Google Takeout is the best way to leave Google Photos, but the Takeout zip file is hard to use. Album Connect manages the import into Apple Photos (Mac only) and turns that zip file back into albums, with dates, places, and Live Photos restored in two easy steps.
Living in both worlds Album Connect lets you share albums in both directions between Apple Photos and Google Photos. That is how you share pictures to and from your cousin who has an Android phone.
Splitting or merging libraries A shared library that should be two. Two that should be one. Take the parts you want, with their structure, and leave the rest.
Anyone whose library got away from them Twenty years of photos and no albums to speak of. The organising tools alone will give you a library you can navigate by the end of an afternoon.

The details

The rest of it.

Platforms	iPhone, iPad, and Mac. One Universal Purchase covers all three.
Languages	English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese — the whole app and its help, not just the menus.
Accessibility	Full VoiceOver support with labelled controls and spoken progress. Dynamic Type, Bold Text, and Voice Control throughout.
Shortcuts	Twelve actions for the Shortcuts app, so exports, imports, and album-building can run on a schedule or a tap.
Help	A searchable manual inside the app, covering every screen — in all seven languages.
Also in the browser	A free web app at albumdrop.holden.digital works in any modern browser, so a collection can reach — or come from — a Windows PC, an Android phone, or a Chromebook by way of Google Photos. Nothing is uploaded to us: your files are processed in the browser itself.
Price	$19.99 once, for all three platforms — buy it and you own it, with nothing further to pay. A $1.99 monthly subscription is offered as an alternative to the purchase, never an addition to it. The web app is free and always will be.

Send the pictures. Send what you know about them.

Buy it once for $19.99, or subscribe at $1.99 a month — the two are alternatives, not a base price and an upgrade. Either way there is no account of ours, nothing further to unlock, and no server of ours holding your photographs.