Hakolyfor macOS

Insert your SD card.
Only the good photos reach Google Photos.

Hakoly is a macOS menu bar app for people who shoot with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Insert the camera's SD card into your Mac and Hakoly imports the photos, filters out the failed shots, uploads the keepers to your Google Photos, and clears the card — with no dialogs to click through.

How it works

  1. Connect your Google account once. During first-run setup you grant Hakoly permission to add photos to your Google Photos library.
  2. Insert the SD card. Hakoly detects camera cards (removable volumes containing a DCIM folder) and starts automatically.
  3. Wait. Your Mac analyzes the photos and drops blurry shots, blown-out or crushed exposures, closed eyes, and accidental frames — then picks the best frame out of each burst.
  4. The selected photos arrive in Google Photos. Hakoly creates an album per shooting date and uploads the selected photos into it.
  5. Eject the card. A file is deleted from the card only after it has been copied to a folder on your Mac and its SHA-256 checksum matches the original.

What it does

All photo analysis happens on your Mac

Focus, exposure, closed eyes, accidental shutter presses — every judgment is made on-device using Apple's Vision framework. No photo is ever sent anywhere for analysis.

One keeper per burst

Hakoly groups bursts by capture time and image similarity, then scores each frame on face capture quality, eye openness, sharpness and aesthetics to choose the frame that represents the group.

No photo is ever lost

A photo is removed from the SD card only when a verified copy exists on your Mac. Photos that were not uploaded still remain on your Mac, and photos the filter rejected are kept for a retention period — you can review them in the app's Rescue view and send any of them to Google Photos.

How Hakoly uses Google Photos

Hakoly uses the Google Photos API to upload photos to the Google account you connect. It requests exactly one scope:

Scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary.appendonly
Used for Uploading the selected photos and creating a per-date album to hold them.
Not possible Reading your Google Photos library, or viewing, modifying, deleting or sharing photos that are already there. This scope is append-only and grants no read access.

Google user data is never used for anything other than this upload feature. It is never sold or transferred to third parties, never used for advertising, and never used to train AI models. See the Privacy Policy for details.

Requirements

Contact

Questions or bug reports: support@hakoly.com