Versioned backup for iCloud Photos
Glassine keeps a verified history of your photo library on a drive you control, including photos deleted from iCloud and every version of every edit.
Coming soon · 30-day trial · one-time purchase · macOS 14 or later
Completely read-only toward your library and iCloud.
Glassine never modifies, moves, or deletes anything in Photos or iCloud, and never uploads anything. It only copies originals out into a backup that belongs to you.
The single exception is the explicit “Restore to library” button. It only adds a new photo back. Nothing else in Glassine can write to your library.
Time travel
Every completed backup becomes a snapshot. Scrub back through time, browse the whole library at that moment, and recover any photo or any older version of an edit.
Built for trust
Glassine is designed around the failure cases: interrupted downloads, silent corruption, missing drives, and the photo you only notice is gone a year later.
A file’s name is its checksum. Restore, export, and verification re-hash every byte and refuse to hand over corrupted data silently. Scheduled scrubbing can re-queue damaged originals while they still exist in iCloud.
The first backup walks the library. After that, PhotoKit’s persistent change token limits work to what changed. Interrupted iCloud downloads resume automatically.
New blobs are written to a temporary location and renamed into place only when complete. A crash cannot leave a half-written file pretending to be a photo.
Content-addressed storage means identical bytes are kept once, however many snapshots reference them. Stable libraries gain history without multiplying storage.
Open forever
Your backup is a standard SQLite index plus plain files. Every store carries recovery instructions that use tools already built into macOS.
You never need Glassine to get your photos back.
# Every store includes RECOVERY.txt mkdir -p ~/recovered sqlite3 index.sqlite \ "SELECT hash, original_filename FROM resource_version" | while read hash name; do cp "blobs/${hash:0:2}/${hash:2:2}/$hash" \ ~/recovered/"$name" done # Plain files. Standard database. Your backup.
Archive, not mirror
Private by absence
Nothing ever leaves your machine. Glassine has no analytics, no crash uploads, and nowhere to send your library. This website is static, sets no cookies, and loads no third-party scripts.
Questions
No. It reads through Apple’s PhotoKit API and is completely read-only toward your library and iCloud. The only write path is the explicit “Restore to library” action, which only adds a new asset.
A missing photo first enters a grace period, so a sync hiccup does not create a false deletion. Once confirmed, its stored pixels are protected independently of snapshot retention and kept forever by default.
With “Optimize Mac Storage,” many originals exist only in iCloud and must be fetched once. Glassine downloads on configurable parallel lanes, resumes interruptions automatically, and later backups process only changes.
Any folder you choose. An external drive or NAS is safest. A store is claimed by one Mac for writing, but browsing, verification, export, and recovery work from any Mac.
Each original is addressed by its SHA-256 hash. Every restore, export, and scrub recalculates that fingerprint and refuses to return bytes that do not match.
macOS hides menu bar icons that don’t fit next to the notch — silently, for every app, and Apple gives apps no way to detect or avoid it. ⌘-drag the Glassine icon toward the clock (rightmost items survive crowding; the position sticks), or use a menu bar manager. Nothing is lost meanwhile: everything in the menu is also in the main window.
Yes. Reads are deliberately device-agnostic. Browse, restore, export, and verify the store from another Mac, even though only the original Mac may continue writing backups into it.
Versioned, verified backup for your iCloud photo library, stored on a drive you control.
Coming soon · 30-day trial · one-time purchase · macOS 14 or later