PictureAttic gathers the photos and videos scattered across your phone dumps, camera cards, old drives and backup exports into one organized archive on your own computer. It never logs into your accounts and nothing is uploaded.
Point PictureAttic at any folder, drive, or export and it collects the photos and videos it finds — JPEG, PNG, HEIC, RAW camera files, MP4/MOV and more. It looks inside archives too (zip, tar.gz, 7z, rar and the rest), including a Google Takeout or iCloud export, and unpacks them automatically.
Password-protected zip, 7z and rar archives are opened too — PictureAttic asks for the password, says if it did not work, and lets you try again or skip the archive. Tick “Apply to all remaining protected archives” to answer once — a password or a skip — for every protected archive the scan still meets.
Add your folders/drives, choose where the archive should go, pick a folder layout, and click Build my archive. Every unique photo is copied into the archive and foldered the way you chose. Your originals are never touched.
PictureAttic reads each photo's and video's built-in metadata (EXIF) to learn which camera or phone took it — e.g. “Apple iPhone 12” or “Canon EOS 5D”. Photos with no camera information (screenshots, edited exports, downloads) are treated as “Unknown Camera”.
Sorting by camera is optional. The “Folder layout” chooser next to the destination lets you pick how photos are foldered:
You can change the layout between runs; it only affects where new photos are filed, and de-duplication still works across the whole archive.
The year is the photo's actual capture date, read from its EXIF metadata — so photos land in the right year even after they've been copied, exported or downloaded (which resets the file date). When there's no capture date, the earliest of the file's created/modified times is used, and anything undatable goes in an “undated” folder.
The same photo usually lives in several places — a phone backup, a drive, an export. PictureAttic compares files by content, so an identical photo is stored once no matter how many copies it finds or what they're named.
It also matches on the photo's embedded metadata, so the same shot is caught even when a service (iCloud, Google Photos) has re-compressed it to different bytes. Files without camera metadata — screenshots, edited exports — are only de-duplicated when they're byte-for-byte identical, so nothing distinct is ever merged by mistake.
Point a later run at the same archive folder to fold in newly-found photos. PictureAttic remembers what it already has, so re-scanning a drive or an overlapping backup copies only what's genuinely new.
Progress is saved as it goes, so a very large library (hundreds of thousands of photos) is safe to stop, or to lose to a crash or power cut — just run it again on the same folders and it picks up where it left off without re-copying anything.
You can stop a run at any time with the Cancel button — every photo already added to the archive stays put.
Every Windows drive has a few folders the system keeps to itself, such as $Recycle.Bin and System Volume Information. Nothing can read them, PictureAttic included.
If you point a run at a whole drive it steps over those folders and carries on, then tells you how many it had to skip — in the run log, and as an “unreadable” count in report.txt. The count is there so a smaller number of photos than you expected is explained rather than mysterious.
A folder you own but have locked down with permissions is counted the same way. If the number looks high, check the log for which folders they were.
The free trial is the full app but keeps up to a few hundred files so you can see it work on your own photos. To remove the limit, click Enter license and paste the license from your purchase email.
One license can cover several apps in the Attic family (PictureAttic, EmailAttic, and so on) — a suite or bundle key unlocks each app it lists. A key that doesn't include PictureAttic won't unlock this app; it stays in trial.
PictureAttic is in English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português and 日本語, and opens in the language your computer uses. The globe button at the top right of the main window switches language at any time; the window changes on the spot. Other languages arrive as free language packs: a small plain-text file from PictureAttic.com/languages. On the Language screen, link 1 opens that page, button 2 installs a downloaded pack, button 3 switches to it. PictureAttic never connects to the internet to fetch one.
PictureAttic never connects to the internet to move your photos. All reading, de-duplicating and copying happens locally. Your source files are opened read-only and are never modified.
Email support@PictureAttic.com. Feedback is always welcome at feedback@PictureAttic.com.