A couple weeks ago, a reader approached me with a fairly straightforward request.

She wanted a simple way to organize a vast catalog of photos, all spread across an array of computer folders. Still, she was uncomfortable putting her photos in the cloud and had bought an external storage drive in hopes of managing everything offline.

While it's the kind of problem I love digging into—especially as my own Google Photos storage allotment runs out—I quickly discovered that the world of personal photo management is a deep rabbit hole, one that could probably fill multiple newsletters. So today, I'm going to focus on one especially intriguing option.

It's called Mylio, and it promises to organize your photos without ever sending them to the cloud. It has a slick photo viewer that can scroll through thousands of photos (I have nearly 16,000), can automatically recognize faces, and has a powerful search tool that supports queries like "Jared and Mom in Los Angeles in 2010."

Mylio offers apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, and it uses your local Wi-Fi network to sync photos between these devices. It also supports backing up your entire collection to external hard drives and NAS devices, plus it can create encrypted backups to Amazon Drive, Google Drive, or OneDrive.

Unfortunately, Mylio isn't any cheaper than major cloud storage options, as it costs $10 per month or $100 per year to manage more than 5,000 photos. (You can try the Premium version without a credit card for two weeks.) And as I've discovered while testing it out, its offline face recognition is a clear step down from what you get with Google Photos, iCloud Photos, and Amazon Photos.

But if you don't trust those big tech companies with your data or you just want more control over your personal photo collection, Mylio is a promising alternative.

Simple setup: Getting started with Mylio is a matter of installing the software and telling it where your photos are. The initial scan can take a while, but once it's finished, you'll have a timeline of all your photos, a calendar view, a map view for geotagged images, and suggestions for face recognition. If you install Mylio's mobile app, it will automatically sync photos from your phone when it's on the same Wi-Fi network.

Impressive speed: Granted, I'm using a desktop computer with a Ryzen 5 processor and 16 GB of RAM, but I was impressed with how Mylio instantly displayed photos as I jumped through my timeline. That's the benefit of having your photos stored locally.

Storage controls: By default, Mylio categorizes your initial computer as a "Vault," meaning that it keeps all photos there at full resolution. When you connect Mylio with other devices, you can choose to auto-optimize images or store just the thumbnails to save storage space, but you'll always have full-resolution copies in the Vault. (You can also set up additional "Vault" devices for safekeeping, which is great if you have external backup drives or NAS devices on hand.)

Import options: In addition to importing photos from an SD card, Mylio can grab images from Flickr or Facebook, and it can import your entire Google Photos library if you use Google Takeout.

Use your own tools: Mylio does have its own built in editing tools, but because the app is just indexing the photos that are already on your computer, you can also easily edit them in external applications such as Photoshop (or my favorite free alternative, Photopea). With Google Photos, you'd have to download and re-upload them first.

Not locked in: When you add people, categories, keywords, and captions in Mylio, the app stores them using industry-standard metadata. In theory that means you shouldn't have any issue moving your library to a different photo manager in the future.

Laborious face recognition: Unsurprisingly, local face recognition is still no match for Google's algorithms, and getting Mylio to recognize every photo of a given person takes a lot of work. The app tends to recognize faces in small, digestible batches, making it easier for you to weed out mismatches and approve the rest. For pictures of children, you'll need to do this often.

If you head to Settings > Advanced, there is an option to reduce the face recognition's accuracy so you can review photos in larger batches, but it's a slog either way.

No object recognition: Unlike most popular online photo tools, you can't search for things like "dogs" or "cars" and get relevant images. At least you can search for text.

Confusing interface: While Mylio's software looks pleasant on the surface and has lots of powerful features, the iconography isn't always clear and even the basics have a learning curve. It took me a while to discover the "Batch Tagging" tool for face recognition, for instance, and I had to use Google to figure out how to assign a location to non-geotagged photos. Even the core concept of "Vault" devices is tough to understand at the outset.

No duplicate removal (yet): As of now, if you have multiple copies of a photo, Mylio will simply display them all, but a major update coming soon will apparently include a de-duplication tool.

I'm still investigating other photo management options for a future issue of Advisorator. Some examples I'm looking at:

Got other solutions you'd like me to investigate? Let me know!

Sonos' next moves: On June7, Sonos will launch a new soundbar called the Ray, for $279. While it's much cheaper than the Sonos Beam ($449) and Arc ($899), it lacks voice control, Dolby Atmos support, and HDMI, so you must connect it to your TV with an optical audio cable.

The latter omission is a biggie for smart TVs or streaming players that can't external audio devices over IR—that includes all Roku devices—as it means you’ll need a separate programmable remote to adjust the soundbar’s volume. But if that's not an issue, the Ray could be a nice entry point to the Sonos ecosystem.

Also interesting: Sonos is launching its own music-focused voice assistant for the One, Beam, and Arc speakers. It will process voice commands entirely on the device itself instead of uploading them to the cloud, which might allay some privacy fears and should also result in snappier responses. This should also make it easier to move audio between Sonos speakers.

Alexa and Google Assistant support aren’t going anywhere, and you’ll even be able to alternate between “Alexa” and “Hey Sonos” commands just by switching wake words. (Google, which hates this idea, makes you switch to its assistant via the Sonos app instead.) Given how often those assistants fail at more complex tasks, I'm intrigued by the idea of a voice assistant that just tries to do music really well. More thoughts from me on this topic over at Fast Company.

A lot of Google news: Google held its big I/O conference last week, at which it announced a lot of new products to come. The Verge has a great rundown, but I'll try to do an even more concise version:

The common thread here is that none of these things are launching now. But I'll keep you posted as tech conference hype meets reality.

Goodbye iPod: Apple has stopped producing the iPod Touch, effectively killing the iPod line after more than 20 years. The seventh-generation model, which launched in 2019, is still available at some retailers "while supplies last."

Over at FastCo, my longtime editor Harry McCracken argues that the iPod actually died in 2014, when Apple discontinued the iPod Classic and ushered in the age of renting music instead of collecting it. At least the iPod modding scene is alive and well for those who still maintain their own music libraries. I'm tempted to dust off my old Classic and join in.

Useful photo tools: PicsArt has launched a new website called QuickTools that's just begging to be bookmarked. It includes more than 20 simple tools for editing photos, videos, and documents, including an image resizer, a video crop tool, and a merge PDF tool that combines multiple files into one big document.

To me, the main attraction is Background Remover, which automatically places the subject of a photo on a transparent background and lets you upload a new background image instead. Unlike some similar tools I've tried in the past, this one maintains the original image resolution and offers unlimited usage.

For that matter, the entire tool collection has no usage limits, no ads, and no registration required. PicsArt is simply hoping that QuickTools users might also decide to try its broader editing suite, but even that upsell is pretty low-pressure. Keep it in mind if you need to make small edits with minimal hassle.

Costco is currently holding a big sale on Windows laptops and related accessories, with several solid options marked down by hundreds of dollars. The folks at Slickdeals have a full list, but here are some highlights:

On May 14, 2018, I sent out the first-ever issue of Advisorator, having no idea whether my plan for a reader-supported tech advice newsletter would work out. All I knew was that the kind of publication I personally wanted to see did not appear to exist, and I had an itch to build it myself.

Four years later, this newsletter is still the thing I'm most proud of in my career and the thing I most obsess over by a fairly wide margin. Whether you've just subscribed or have been here since the beginning, thank you so much for making Advisorator possible.

Until next week,
Jared