NOW ON THE APP STORE — iPhone, iPad & Mac

Your photos live on the NAS.
Browse them like they're local.

Loomey Viewer is a free NAS photo viewer for iPhone, iPad & Mac. Point it at an SMB share, a USB drive or a local folder and it simply shows what's there — no account, no cloud, no import, no index.

SMB 2/3 · Synology · Unraid · TrueNAS 90,000+ assets tested HEIC · RAW · streamed video Data Not Collected

● Free — no account, no ads iPhone, iPad & Mac · No account needed

Loomey Viewer photo grid on iPhone, browsing a NAS photo archive over SMB

video streamed from NAS
36.8 GB file
ready to play < 1 s
transferred ~3.5 MB

01 How it works

No import. No index.
No copies of your library.

Most photo apps want to own your files before they show them. Loomey Viewer reads your archive where it already is — thumbnails are generated lazily and cached on the device, and nothing is ever written to your share.

S·01

Connect

Loomey Viewer discovers SMB servers on your network — Synology, Unraid, TrueNAS, a Raspberry Pi, another Mac — or connects by address. Credentials live only in your device keychain.

S·02

Browse

Your folder structure stays exactly as it is. Jump through years and folders in a fast grid — 90,000+ assets stay responsive because nothing gets scanned up front.

S·03

View

Full-resolution photos, camera RAW included, and videos that stream straight off the share — no “downloading…” progress bar first.

smb:// server discovery — your NAS, found in seconds

02 Video streaming

Press play on a 36.8 GB video.
It starts in under a second.

Videos are streamed, not downloaded. The player asks for byte ranges, Loomey Viewer translates them into SMB range-reads on a separate connection — so a huge video never blocks your thumbnails.

Instant scrubbing — jumping around the timeline requests exactly the bytes it needs.
~3.5 MB transferred before a 36.8 GB MOV was ready to play in our test.
No temp copies — your device doesn't need 36 GB of free space to watch a 36 GB clip.

// streaming test — real archive, real numbers open smb://nas.local/archive/2024/clip_0847.mov size 36.8 GB read 512 KB range-requests × dedicated connection sent ~3.5 MB total state ▶ ready to play — < 1 s

03 Formats

RAW from the camera.
HEIC from the phone.

Archives are messy — a decade of phones and cameras in one folder tree. Loomey Viewer opens what's actually in there, including full camera RAW, without conversion.

Photos

HEICJPEG PNGTIFF

Camera RAW

ProRAW / DNGCR2 CR3NEF ARWRAF ORFRW2

Video — streamed from the share

MOVMP4 M4V

A ProRAW DNG file opened in Loomey Viewer directly from the NAS

IMG_1672.DNG — a ProRAW file, opened straight off the share

04 Privacy

“Data Not Collected.”
Apple's words, not ours.

That's the App Store privacy label Loomey Viewer ships with — the strictest one there is. Easy to earn when there's simply nothing to collect.

No account, no sign-up, no analytics SDK
Media and credentials never leave your network
Logins stored only in your device's keychain
Read-only by design — it never writes to your share

App Store privacy label

Data Not
Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Read the full privacy policy →

06 FAQ

Short answers.

Is it really free? What's the catch?

Free, no ads, no in-app purchases, no data harvesting (see the privacy label above). Loomey Viewer exists so people with a self-hosted photo archive have a great way to look at it — if you ever want to build such an archive, that's what Loomey is for.

Which NAS systems work with it?

Anything that speaks SMB 2 or 3: Synology, QNAP, Unraid, TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, a Windows share, a Mac with file sharing on, a Raspberry Pi running Samba. It also opens USB drives and local folders directly.

Does it index or upload my photos?

No. There's no upfront scan, no database of your library and no cloud component. Thumbnails are generated on demand and cached on your device; your media and credentials never leave your network.

How does it handle very large libraries?

It was tested against an archive of 90,000+ photos, videos and RAW files over SMB. Because nothing is indexed up front and thumbnails load lazily, browsing stays responsive. Very large originals (50–100 MB ProRAW) take a moment on first view, then come from the cache.

Where do the photos on my NAS come from in the first place?

Any way you like — many people use Loomey to back up their iPhone library to the NAS with verified, duplicate-free exports. Loomey Viewer then browses exactly that folder structure.

I have a problem — where do I get help?

Straight from the developer: the support page has answers to common setup questions and a direct contact address. One person builds this app; the same person answers.

Your photos live on the NAS.
Browse them like they're local.