Vault is currently in beta. It is stable enough for daily use, but you may hit bugs. If you find one, note down what you were doing and email terry.harris@paperpix.io or reach us through the app menu. Auto-updates ship fixes rapidly.
Vault reads your photos, generates thumbnails, and indexes their metadata. It does not move, rename, delete, or otherwise alter the original files on disk. The only file changes Vault ever makes are IPTC caption / byline / credit fields inside JPEGs when you explicitly save an edit in the caption editor.
Everything else — thumbnails, search index, ratings, collections — lives in Vault's own catalogue folder, separate from your photos.
Vault is a native desktop cataloguer for photojournalists and photographers with large local libraries. You point it at any drive — local disk, NAS, USB, or external SSD — and it indexes every photo and video into a searchable catalogue. Files never move.
It is deliberately free forever. Vault is the client half of the PaperPix.io ecosystem; the paid PaperPix.io service (£8.99/month, coming soon to the Vault app) adds cloud distribution and destination push. Vault by itself is fully functional without any account or subscription.
Grab the installer for your platform from the downloads page.
Both installers are currently unsigned. Code-signing certificates from Microsoft and Apple cost hundreds a year, and while Vault is in free beta we've chosen not to pay for them yet. That means Windows and macOS will show a "this app can't be verified" warning on first launch. You bypass it once and you're done.
The installers you download from paperpix.io are built by GitHub Actions from the public source, signed with our minisign updater key, and unchanged on the way to you. Nothing to worry about — but the OS doesn't know that without a cert.
PaperPix-Vault_*_x64-setup.exe.SmartScreen won't warn again after the first install. Auto-updates (Settings → Check for updates) don't trigger it at all because they run through the app's own signed updater channel.
PaperPix-Vault_*_aarch64.dmg.xattr -cr "/Applications/PaperPix Vault.app"Then double-click to launch.
Both fixes are one-time. Later launches (and auto-updates) never re-trigger the prompt.
Same as Apple Silicon — download the Intel .dmg instead of aarch64 and follow the same steps.
Fair. Wait until Vault exits beta and we invest in proper code-signing certs, at which point the warnings will disappear entirely. Meanwhile you can inspect the source at the download page (linked from the app's About section) and confirm the installer's SHA-256 matches what CI published if you want to be extra cautious.
A source is any folder Vault watches. It could be your main photo library, a specific NAS share, an SD card mounted from a card reader, whatever. You can have as many sources as you like.
Steps:
On a big library the first scan takes a while. Vault shows you exactly where it is throughout.
Phase 1: Walking — Vault enumerates every folder and file. On 100k+ files this takes several minutes; you'll see file counts tick up and the current directory being walked. No files are opened or hashed yet.
Phase 2: Processing — each media file is opened once, hashed (for deduplication), thumbnailed, EXIF/IPTC/GPS/XMP metadata extracted, and inserted into the catalogue. Runs in parallel across every CPU core. On a modern machine this is ~200 files per second.
Rescan is fast — existing files are skipped by path, only new or moved files hit the full processing path. Metadata is refreshed on the fast path.
Once a scan is running you'll see the sidebar populate live. Sources sit at the top; expanding a source shows the "sets" (top-level folders) with photo counts.
Long set lists get a "+ N more" expander so the sidebar stays manageable. Sort sets by count (default), name, or date.
Photos render in a lazy-loaded grid. Scroll infinitely — results paginate 500 tiles at a time automatically as you scroll toward the bottom.
The search bar at the top runs across filenames, captions, headlines, and keywords across every source in real time.
The Matched sets dropdown lists every set (folder) where your search term appears with a count. Click any row to narrow the results to that specific set while keeping the search active.
Filters layer on top: date range, file type (image/video), 360° only, minimum star rating, colour label. Filter combinations are additive.
Sort with the Sort dropdown next to the count: newest/oldest first, name A-Z / Z-A, rating high-to-low, largest/smallest file.
Right-click any photo or use the info button on the tile to open the caption editor. Every IPTC field a photojournalist needs is available: headline, caption, keywords, byline, credit, source, city, sub-location, province, country, transmission reference, and more.
Save & Next and Save & Prev buttons make it fast to caption a whole shoot. Templates let you save repeated boilerplate (your byline, credit, rights) once and paste into every photo.
All changes write straight back into the JPEG's IPTC APP13 block on disk — industry-standard, readable by any picture desk system.
Nothing outside of explicit IPTC saves in the caption editor ever modifies your original files. All other Vault activity is read-only from your source drives.
Collections are named buckets that can hold photos from any source together. Great for "Send tomorrow", "Client X portfolio", "2025 highlights", "Award submissions".
Create a collection with the + next to COLLECTIONS in the sidebar. Add photos by drag-and-drop from the grid, or right-click a selection → Add to collection.
Collections don't move or copy files. They're just a list of photo references — a photo can be in as many collections as you like.
Click Map at the top of the sidebar. Every photo with GPS EXIF data is plotted on an interactive world map, clustered where multiple photos share a location.
Click a cluster to zoom in. Click an individual pin to see a thumbnail and a "click thumb to open editor" prompt. Layers control (top-right) switches between street, satellite, and terrain views.
Only photos with GPS in their EXIF appear on the map — typically drone shots and phone photos. Camera shots without GPS won't show.
Equirectangular 360° photos (from GoPro Max, Insta360, RICOH Theta, DJI, etc.) are detected via the standard GPano XMP tags and get a 360° badge on the tile. Opening one in the big viewer launches an interactive spherical viewer — drag to pan/tilt, scroll to zoom, fullscreen button in the corner.
Filter to just 360°s via Filters → 360° panoramas → 360° only.
Vault indexes every mainstream RAW format — Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF/NRW, Sony ARW/SRF/SR2, Fuji RAF, Olympus ORF, Panasonic RW2, Adobe DNG, Pentax PEF, Hasselblad 3FR, Phase One IIQ, Sigma X3F, Samsung SRW.
Thumbnails come from the camera's embedded JPEG preview via exiftool. On Windows exiftool is bundled with the installer — zero setup. On Mac install it once with:
brew install exiftool
Rescan any source afterwards and RAW thumbnails will populate. Without exiftool, RAW files still appear in the catalogue and are IPTC-editable, but tiles show "no preview".
Open Settings from the sidebar footer, then Check for updates. If a new version is available you'll see the version jump plus release notes from every version since your current install. Click Install & restart and the app downloads, verifies, and relaunches on the new version.
Updates are signed with minisign so the app refuses tampered artifacts even if paperpix.io was compromised. The whole process takes about 30 seconds on a fast connection.
Vault stores its own catalogue — not your photos — in an app data folder:
%APPDATA%\PaperPixVault~/Library/Application Support/PaperPixVaultInside sits catalogue.db (SQLite index of every photo and its metadata), a thumbs/ folder (compact JPEG thumbnails, ~10–30KB each), and configuration files.
On a 200k photo library the catalogue is typically 200-400MB — small relative to your originals.
Want the catalogue on a different drive (e.g. a fast SSD)? Settings → Catalogue location → Change location.... Vault moves the whole catalogue and restarts automatically.
Vault isn't code-signed during beta (Windows code-signing certs cost hundreds a year). Click More info → Run anyway. This warning goes away once we sign the installer post-beta.
macOS Gatekeeper quarantines apps downloaded from the internet that aren't Apple-notarized. Run this in Terminal:
xattr -cr "/Applications/PaperPix Vault.app"
Then launch normally. One-time fix.
Walking a 200k-file tree over a slow NAS can take 10+ minutes with no visible file counts moving. Give it time. The progress panel updates every ~200ms with the current directory. If it truly hangs, close Vault, reopen, and hit Rescan.
Vault couldn't extract a thumbnail. Common causes:
brew install exiftool)brew install ffmpeg on Mac)Your photos may not have GPS EXIF. Drone shots and phone photos typically do; DSLR/mirrorless camera shots typically don't unless you paired the body with a phone or an external GPS receiver.
Not concurrently — the SQLite catalogue is single-writer. But you can point Vault on machine A at a NAS folder, and Vault on machine B at the same NAS folder. Each machine keeps its own independent catalogue (thumbnails, ratings, collections). The photos themselves stay in sync since they're on the shared drive.
Great — that's what beta is for. Email terry.harris@paperpix.io with: