Curator is made by one person. There is no team, no investors and no company behind it — just me, in Switzerland, building the photo app I wanted and couldn't find.
Who I am
I'm Oscar Lampe. I'm from New Zealand and I live in Switzerland with my wife and our two children, who are one and three, and who are the reason my photo library looks the way it does.
I take a lot of photos on my iPhone — family, and the ordinary adventures that come with small kids. I work part-time in sustainability. Curator is a side project, built in the evenings, and it is the first app I have ever released.
Why I built Curator
Around Christmas 2025 I sat down to make a photo album for my kids and gave up somewhere in the spring. The library had over 30,000 photos in it and no structure at all — thousands of similar shots, half-started albums, no sense of where the good photos actually were. Over the following weeks I cut it down to 22,000 entirely by hand. The full version of that story is in how to finally clean up your iPhone photo library.
It worked, and it convinced me that nobody should have to do it that way.
So I looked at what was already on the App Store, and I didn't like what I found. Most of the apps showed you one photo at a time and asked you to swipe left or right — which is fine for fifty photos and unbearable for twenty thousand, because a photo shown alone gives you no idea whether it's one of two attempts or one of fifteen. Several wanted a weekly subscription for a job that is mostly a one-off clear-out. Several collected analytics tied to my identity, which for an app that reads your entire camera roll struck me as a strange thing to ask for.
I decided I'd rather build it than install and pay for any of them.
How it was built
I'm not a professional developer. I found Claude Code in January 2026, started building with it, and released Curator in July — via a great many late nights that would have undoubtedly been better spent sleeping, which is a scarce resource when your children are so little.
I mention this because I think it matters when you're deciding whether to trust an app with your photo library. Curator isn't the product of a large team with a security department. It's the product of one person who cared enough about the problem to spend six months on it, and who made a few deliberate architectural decisions specifically so that trusting me wouldn't be necessary.
Three decisions I'm not going to change
These are the choices the whole app is built around, and they're the ones I'd want to know about as a user.
Everything happens on your device. Curator runs no servers. The neural network that recognises similar photos ships inside the app and runs on your phone, offline. Your photos have nowhere to go, which is a stronger guarantee than any promise I could write down. You can verify it yourself by running a scan in airplane mode — I've explained the whole mechanism in what actually happens when an app analyses your photos.
No data is collected. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking. Curator carries Apple's "Data Not Collected" label on its App Store listing. Usage analytics would genuinely help me build a better app, and I decided against them anyway, because I didn't want to ask anyone to trust a boundary I'd drawn myself.
One payment, never a subscription. Building this cost real time and money, so it isn't free forever — but it's a single purchase that unlocks everything permanently. The free tier covers the last 30 days of your library, and it isn't a preview: within that window you can actually delete photos, build and publish albums, so you can find out whether the app works for you before paying anything. More on the reasoning in are photo cleaner apps safe?.
What Curator does today
Two things. It cleans — finding duplicates, similar photos, screenshots and oversized videos, then grouping the similar ones so you review a whole scene at once rather than a single photo in isolation. And it curates — grouping your library into suggested albums by trip, place and time, which you can adjust, publish to Apple Photos, and send to be printed.
The grouped review is the part I'm proudest of, and the part I think is genuinely better than anything else I've tried: seeing all nine attempts at the same moment side by side, with a keeper already suggested, turns a two-minute agonising decision into a two-second one. That's my own opinion of my own app, so weigh it accordingly — but it's why the app exists.
Where it's going
I've got lists of to-do's and ideas, but I can point to two features I'm working towards in particular, both of which come out of using the app on my own library.
Better Live Photos. Have you ever thought about how many Live Photos are sitting in your library showing a blurry or unremarkable key frame, when there's a better moment a fraction of a second either side of it? The scan pipeline already in Curator can find those. The plan is to have it identify Live Photos with a stronger frame available, propose the improvement, and let you adjust the frame yourself before accepting it.
Albums by person. Curator's album suggestions are currently bounded by a time window or a geographic radius, which works for trips and fails completely for the album defined by a person — every photo of my children with their late grandfather, scattered across years and dozens of unrelated days. Apple's photo library already recognises people; the plan is to use that to seed a search and then expand outward from each result, because when you're making an album about someone you don't only want photos with their face in them (as Apple will suggest). You want the whole of his 80th birthday: the grandchildren, the table at lunch, the garden, the photos he wasn't in too. I've written more about that gap in organising thousands of iPhone photos into albums.
Get in touch
Every email to support@curatorapp.ch comes to me and I read all of them. If something is broken, if a feature would make the app work better for how you use your photos, or if you just want to know how something works — write. It's a one-person operation, so the feedback goes straight to the person who can act on it.
Curator is available on the App Store as a one-time purchase. You can read about how it works, browse the FAQ, or read the privacy policy, which is short and says what you'd expect.