Free desktop companion

Famileze for Mac

A complete copy of your family archive on a computer you own — kept as ordinary photo and text files you can open, move or hand to anyone. It is where you bring a lifetime of photos in from everywhere else.

⬇︎  Download for Mac
Version 0.1.36 · 350 MB · macOS 10.15 or later · Intel & Apple Silicon
Free · doesn’t use your co-parent place · your phone stays in charge
Looks like you’re not on a Mac. This is the Mac download — open this page on your computer when you’re ready. Everything in Famileze works on your phone without it, or you can send yourself this link: updates.famileze.app/mac.

Installing it

About a minute, and it is the standard Mac way.

  1. Download the fileIt arrives in your Downloads folder as Famileze.dmg. Double-click it and a window opens.
  2. Drag Famileze into your Applications folderThe window shows the Famileze icon next to an Applications shortcut — drag one onto the other. That is the install.
  3. Eject the disk image and open FamilezeDrag the mounted disk to the Trash (or press ⌘E), then open Famileze from your Applications folder or Launchpad. You can delete the .dmg afterwards.
  4. Link it to your family, onceOn your phone, open Famileze → Settings and show the computer its pairing code. Nothing is copied until you do — and your phone stays the one in charge afterwards.

What it adds

The first three are things the phone genuinely cannot do on its own.

📁  A copy you actually hold

Your whole archive on your own disk as ordinary photo and text files, laid out by date. No database, no export step, nothing locked inside an app — and it keeps working exactly as it does today whether or not you keep subscribing.

📥  The rest of your life, brought in

Years of photos exported from Google Photos, Snapchat, iCloud or an old hard drive, read straight off your computer and filed by the date they were taken. This is the heavy lifting, and it is why the desktop app exists.

💾  Room, and a way out

A desktop copy is limited only by your own hard drive, and Back up everything copies the lot to an external drive — photos by date, named with your captions, next to one page that opens on any computer.

🔍  The same Famileze, bigger

The same timeline, folders, calendar and search you use on your phone — just with your whole history in it rather than the recent slice a phone can hold.

Your privacy, plainly

  • 🔒Your archive is encrypted end-to-end. Your photos, notes, calendar, health records and lists are scrambled on your own devices before they go anywhere, so what passes through us is unreadable to us. We cannot see your family’s photos — not on the server, not ever.
  • ☁️Encrypted, and backed up. Famileze does use a cloud — that is what makes a lost or broken phone survivable. It just holds ciphertext your devices hold the keys to. The desktop app adds a second home for the same archive, on hardware you own.
  • 🤖No cloud AI reads any of it. There is no language model anywhere in Famileze. The tools that read handwriting or transcribe a voice note run on your own machine — desktop dictation runs entirely on your own computer.
  • ✉️Email is the honest exception. A newsletter to grandparents, and mail forwarded in to your family address, have someone outside your family at the other end — so there is no shared key to scramble them with. Incoming mail waits in readable form until your device collects it, and is deleted within 30 days.
  • 🔑We cannot recover your archive for you. That is the same fact as the first one, said honestly: holding no key means holding no back door. Keep a computer copy, and you always have your own way in.

Full detail: privacy policy.

Questions

What does the desktop app actually do?

It keeps a full copy of your family archive on a computer you own, and it keeps it as ordinary photo and text files — not locked inside an app database. It is also where the heavy lifting happens: importing years of photos out of Google Photos, Snapchat or an old hard drive, and copying the whole archive to an external drive. Everything it takes in syncs back to your phone.

Do I need it?

No. Famileze runs completely on your phone — capture, calendar, health notes, lists, newsletters and co-parent sharing all work with no computer involved, and your archive is backed up to your family’s private cloud either way. The desktop app is for two things the phone genuinely cannot do: hold a copy you control as plain files, and take in a lifetime of photos from somewhere else.

Does it cost anything, or use up my co-parent place?

Neither. The desktop app is free, and a computer does not take the co-parent seat — so you can run it and still invite your partner.

Can I put it on two computers?

Yes. A second computer keeps its own full copy, which is the safest arrangement there is: if each parent runs it, your family’s story lives in two homes as well as the cloud.

Will it slow my Mac down or fill my disk?

It only works while it is open, and it stores what your archive actually holds — photos and video are the bulk of it, exactly as they would be in a Photos library. You can see the size at any time, and you choose where the archive folder lives, including an external drive.

What happens if I stop subscribing?

The copy on your computer keeps working exactly as it did. It is ordinary files on your own disk, so nothing is held hostage — that is the whole reason the desktop app exists and it is free for the same reason.

Is there a Windows version?

Not yet. Mac first; Windows is on the list. The phone app is the product either way, so nothing about your archive depends on owning a Mac.

If something goes wrong

macOS says it “cannot be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software”

This appears when a download is still being verified, or if the file was interrupted on the way down. Right-click (or Control-click) Famileze in your Applications folder and choose Open — you will get the same message with an Open button on it, and that only has to be done once. If it keeps happening, download the file again rather than working around it.

The download stops partway, or the file will not open

Almost always an interrupted download. Delete the .dmg from your Downloads folder and get it again — a half-finished disk image looks like a corrupt one.

I opened it and it is asking me to connect to my family

That is right. The Mac joins the archive you already have, so it needs to be linked once: open Famileze on your phone → Settings → the computer pairing code, and scan it. Nothing is copied until the two are linked, and the pairing code expires after 24 hours.

My phone still says it cannot find my computer

The Mac only talks to your archive while Famileze is actually open on it. Open the app on the computer and give it a minute. If your phone has been waiting a long time, opening the desktop app about once a week is the one habit that keeps everything collected.

It says my invite or pairing code has already been used

Those codes are deliberately single-use and expire in 24 hours. Generate a fresh one from Settings on the phone.

Still stuck? Email support@famileze.app and tell us what you saw — a real person reads it.