I make photographs.
I make the tools.

André Berg — photographer in Norway, developer of the Photo Suite for macOS.

The Photo Suite

What leaving Lightroom actually required: a complete photography workflow for macOS. Files and folders, XMP sidecars, no catalog, no lock-in.

Photo Developer
Photo Culler
Photo Archive
Photo Suite
A suite of apps. One philosophy. Zero subscriptions.
Cull, archive, develop — and three smaller tools alongside them. Every app reads and writes the same open metadata, so no app owns your photos.
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Start with Photo Developer

The RAW engine the rest of the suite works around. Film-like rendering, honest controls, and every adjustment written to a plain sidecar you can still read in ten years. $34.99 on the Mac App Store, once.

See what it does Free 30-day trial
Photo Developer's compare view: the flat RAW on the left, the developed frame on the right, with the Grade panel open on the right-hand side
The compare view, mid-session — flat RAW on the left, the developed frame on the right.

From the blog

Develop sessions with the decisions, arguments about tools, and a look at how I use Photo Developer to develop.

Sep 07, 2026 Photography

Having Moved From Lightroom

A photograph developed in Lightroom in 2024, reopened two years later in Photo Developer. The edits came across in the sidecar. Here is what arrived, what didn't, and how I prepared the archive before leaving.

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Aug 28, 2026 Photography

Ten Thousand Photos

A man on the MacRumors forums has ten thousand family photos in folders by year and wants software that will simply show them to him. Every "how to organize photos on a Mac" guide answers a different question, and each one picks a different place to keep your ratings and keywords. There are four such places, and which one you're in decides what survives the software.

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Aug 21, 2026 Photography

The Skylift in Fog

Three of our four days at Loen were rain and low cloud. This frame of the skylift disappearing into it went black and white in about ten minutes — Smart Develop, two presets, a handful of moves. The RAW is attached.

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All writing  ·  RSS

There's also a book. Life as User Experience applies software design principles to life — with honesty about what fails.

And before the suite there were eleven small iOS apps, all still on the App Store, none of them subscriptions. All apps →

Less, but better

Every app does one thing. The feature lists are short because the kill lists are long.

On-device, always

No analytics, no accounts, no server calls. Your photos and words never leave your machine.

Constraint as method

The writing argues for limits. The apps are built inside them.

Buy once, keep forever

One-time purchases, plain files, open metadata. Nothing here is designed to make leaving hard.