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Home » Mylio Photos Review – Cloudless Photo Management

Mylio Photos Review – Cloudless Photo Management

Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos combines powerful photo management features such as AI keyword tagging and Face recognition with the ability to unify a photo collection divided across multiple disks and devices. Moreover, it can do so without relying on cloud technology or even an internet connection.

As a result, Mylio Photos’ is a unique and highly competent solution for those looking to consolidate and bring order to large and fragmented photo libraries. Jump to Conclusion | Try Mylio Photos for Free


Mylio Photos

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Table of Contents

What is Mylio Photos

Browsing images in Mylio Photos
Browsing photos in Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos is a photo management studio that uses peer-to-peer networking to consolidate all your computer, smartphone, and cloud images into a single highly accessible photo library. In other words, Mylio Photos lets you browse all your smartphone photos from your computer and all your computer’s pictures from your smartphone.

Furthermore, since Mylio Photos leverages device-to-device networking, the consolidation of images is not dependent on Cloud technology. Instead, your devices will communicate directly with each other – so long as they are connected to the same network.

However, Mylio Photos does not shun the Cloud entirely. Your subscription includes Mylio Drive, an unlimited cloud storage solution for optimized copies of your original images. It enables you to share pictures between any internet-connected devices, whether they share the same network or not, thus creating the illusion of a single photo library.

Key to this illusion is Mylio’s Optimized Images. By default, your original images stay put on their device of origin. Instead, Mylio Photo creates and distributes optimized copies that are nearly identical to the original, yet less than 10% of the original image’s file size. This technology allows you to store vast quantities of images on limited-storage devices such as smartphones.

Yet, Mylio Photos does much more than consolidating your fragmented photo collection. Its photo management system includes modern perks such as Face Recognition, AI Keyword Tagging and Search, Geotagging, and even a serviceable photo editing mode. Moreover, Mylio’s Vault feature makes it easy to back up your fragmented photo collection.

Watch Mylio Photos Review. The written review continues below.

How much is Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos costs US$12.99 each month or $119 per year. In return, you’ll receive Mylio Photos for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Mylio Drive, a cloud-hosted drive with unlimited storage for all your Optimized images. In addition, you can add Mylio Secure Cloud 2TB for $11.98 – a cloud-hosted storage you can use to back up all your original full-size images. Browse the latest prices now.

Mylio Photos Free Trial

Why not try Mylio Photos free for 30 days? Download Mylio Photos Now.

What does Mylio Photos do?

Photo Management

Photo Management in Mylio Photos
Browsing photos in Mylio Photos

With Mylio Photos, you can rate your images, tag them with keywords and categories, and assign them to albums. In addition, Mylio offers contemporary photo management features such as face recognition, AI keyword tagging, and geotagging.

When importing images, you can leave your files where they are presently stored or move/copy them into Mylio Photo’s folder structure. You can add pictures to Mylio Photos from physical disks, NAS, and your existing Cloud providers.

Device Integration

Adding Devices in Mylio Photos
I have attached my computer, iPhone, Mylio Drive cloud storage, and a USB external disk as my Vault backup.

You can connect multiple devices, such as computers, smartphones, and tablets, to your Mylio Photo library. After that, Mylio Photos, by default, will send optimized copies of all your original images to each device, thus producing the illusion of a single photo library that, functionally speaking, works entirely like a single photo library.

Critically, communication between your devices occurs over your local network; thus, neither the Internet nor the Cloud is required. However, your subscription includes Mylio Drive, a cloud storage service that offers unlimited storage for your optimized images. If you enable Mylio Drive, you can share your photos between all your Internet-connected devices regardless of the network they are connected to.

Mylio Photos Device Diagram
My Mylio configuration.

A key component of this technology is Optimized Images. An optimized image’s file size is less than 10% of the originals yet is almost functionally identical in viewing and editing. These optimized images are shipped to each of your connected devices while the original image remains safely on the device on which it was initially stored or captured.

Mylio for Android and iOS

Mylio Photos App

The free Mylio mobile app lets you browse your consolidated photo collection from most Android and Apple iOS devices. Besides browsing your photo library, you can use the app to organize and edit your images.

Vault Backups

You can add multiple external drives, NAS, and Cloud drives to Mylio Photos and assign them as Vault Storage. Hereafter, that drive will be reserved to back up your entire consolidated photo collection, regardless of how many devices your collection is divided across.

Moreover, you can add multiple Vaults. For example, you may have one Vault assigned to an affordable external hard drive and another Vault held off-site in the Cloud. Such a configuration will mitigate risks like house floods, fires, and ransomware. To that end, Mylio supports Google Drive, OneDrive, S3-compatible Cloud hosts, and NAS. Mylio also offers its own Mylio Drive + cloud storage. Browse Mylio Cloud Prices now.

Internet Share

Browsing Mylio Photos albums via a web browser
Browsing one of my published Mylio Photos albums over the internet via the Firefox web browser

You can assign batches of images to an album and then share that album with family, friends, clients, and anyone with access to a web browser and your album’s URL web link.

Face Recognition

Face Recognition in Mylio Photos
Face Recognition in Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos features Face Recognition, enabling you to browse for photos by those who appear in them. To use this feature, you manually add a name to your photo’s subject, and then Mylio Photos will crawl your collection to find other images featuring that person. Overall, face recognition in Mylio Photos is well implemented and similarly reliable to those of ACDSee and Adobe.

Geotagging

Geotagging images using the map view in Mylio Photos
Browsing photos by where they were taken

You can use Mylio Photo’s Map view to browse photos by where they were taken. Moreover, you can use the map view to geotag images captured by cameras lacking GPS. Doing so will make the image visible in the map view and insert the location’s address and coordinates into your photo’s metadata, thus making the image’s location known to other software applications.

Smart Tags

AI Keyword smart tags in Mylio Photos
Mylio Photo’s automatic keyword tagging is largely reliable and hugely convenient.

Mylio Photos uses object recognition to automatically identify and tag unique elements in your photos, such as Animals, Mountains, Birds, and Water. As a result, you’ll be able to browse your photos by their content. For example, you could search for all images featuring Birds.

Overall, I’ve found Smart Tags to be reliable and very useful. However, you can delete inaccurate Smart Tags and supplement them with manually added keywords.

Social Media Integration

Connect Mylio Photos with an online service such as Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr, and Mylio Photos will automatically import all your posted photos onto your computer.

Photo Editing

Choosing Presets in Mylio Photos
Browsing Presets in Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos included standard photo editing features such as Presets, auto-tune, and manual adjustments such as Exposure, White Balance, Contrast, and Sharpening. Furthermore, Mylio Photos edit mode is well-implemented, responsive, and generally pleasant to use and is entirely sufficient for fundamental editing.

However, Mylio Photos cannot keep up with contemporary photo editing tools such as Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab, ON1 Photo Raw, or ACDSee Photo Studio. Specifically, it lacks modern features such as AI noise reduction and auto masking. Nor is it equipped to make fine adjustments to color and light or able to merge HDR or Focus stacks.

Therefore, you should consider Mylio Photos a highly competent photo management application with some photo editing rather than a Lightroom-like all-in-one photo studio. To this end, you can invoke your favorite photo editing application from within Mylio Photos.

What is Mylio Photos like to use

Photo editing in Mylio Photos
Editing Photos in Mylio Photos

Mylio Photos can be unwelcoming to beginners. While its interface is well presented and highly responsive, it may take time to become familiar with its extensive array of no-name icons and the screens they will launch you into.

Setting up Mylio Photos is easier than it could have been, thanks to a ‘Getting Started’ mode, which guides you through setting up your user accounts, devices, and drives. Adding each of your devices and drives is commendably straightforward.

However, Mylio Photos’ peer-to-peer networking, sync policies, and convoluted blending of original and optimized images can be complex concepts to grasp. At times, I was unsure whether I was working with an original file or an optimized image – not that it functionally matters. Worse still, I was worried that if I removed a device or altered its sync policy, its original files could be lost. You’ll soon learn that Mylio Photo does not automatically remove original files. Yet this is not evident while using it.

In contrast, despite its disadvantages, Lightroom’s single monolithic cloud-hosted image basket is a straightforward concept to understand. With Mylio Photos, your images are one, many, and everywhere.

Therefore, it takes a little time to master Mylio Photos and just a little longer to become comfortable with how it works.

Best Mylio Photos Alternatives

  1. ACDSee Professional
  2. Lightroom

Mylio Photos vs ACDSee Professional

The Develop tab in ACDSee Professional 2025
ACDSee Professional is an excellent photo management tool and one of the best photo editing software applications on the market.

Like Mylio Photo, ACDSee Professional offers contemporary photo management features such as Face Recognition, AI Keyword tagging, and Geotagging. You can also transmit images from your smartphone to ACDSee via the free ACDSee Share App. However, you cannot transmit computer-hosted photos back to your smartphone.

Critically, you can buy ACDSee Professional outright for a one-time payment, and its outstanding photo editing capabilities are leagues ahead of Mylio Photos. However, ACDSee cannot consolidate and manage a fragmented photo collection like Mylio Photos can, so it becomes a question of priorities.

One solution is to subscribe to ACDSee 365 and upload your images to the cloud, making your photos viewable via any device with a standard web browser. However, cloud storage is not cheap and depends on moving full-size originals. In contrast, Mylio Photos automatically creates and distributes exceptionally efficient optimized copies to all connected devices with or without the cloud or internet connection.

Therefore, ACDSee Professional is better if your photo collection is primarily contained within your computer. But, if your photo collection is fragmented across many devices, Mylio Photos is the way to go.

 Read ACDSee Professional Review.

Mylio Photo vs Lightroom

Lightroom Photo Editing
Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom is an all-in-one photo studio combining highly competent photo management and editing. As with Mylio Photos, you can use Face Recognition to order photos by those who appear in them and take advantage of AI keyword tagging. Moreover, Lightroom is vastly superior to Mylio Photos in photo editing.

However, Lightroom’s standout feature is its integration with the Cloud. While Mylio Photos uses device-to-device communication to distribute optimized copies of your images to each device evenly, Lightroom centralizes your original pictures in the Cloud, thus serving as a hub to any device that can connect to it. What’s more, Lightroom includes one terabyte of storage and costs about the same monthly as Mylio Photos. Yet, Lightroom’s approach does have some downsides.

First, while Lightroom can present images stored on local disks, features such as Face recognition and AI keyword tagging are limited to cloud-hosted images. Second, because your photos are hosted on the cloud, access to those images via any given device depends on an internet connection. Third, once you exceed 1TB of cloud storage, you must subscribe to more. In contrast, Mylio Photos’ combination of optimized images and device-to-device distribution can function without the Internet or the Cloud. However, your costs would be deferred from Cloud storage to local disk instead.

Your final Lightroom concern may come down to ownership. Ultimately, you’re handing your images to be looked after by a company that assumes no liability in the event of their destruction. Adobe also reserves the right to use your pictures in unspecified ways, which has included the training of AI models.

Therefore, choosing between Mylio Photos and Lightroom depends on how you feel about the Cloud. If your photo collection is well below 1TB and you have no issues accessing the internet, you might prefer the walled-garden simplicity of Lightroom. However, if you have an extensive photo collection spread across multiple drives and devices, Mylio Photos is the better choice.

Read my Lightroom review for more information.


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Conclusion

Mylio Photos is a superb photo management application capable of consolidating and organizing large photo libraries that have been fragmented across multiple drives and devices. But what makes Mylio Photos unique is its ability to do so without the Cloud or even an internet connection.

Instead, Mylio Photo’s combination of device-to-device networking and optimized files presents the illusion of a single monolithic photo library regardless of whichever device you choose to view it. Yet, while it may be an illusion, it operates exactly like a single library. For instance, if you delete an image on one device, it will disappear from them all. If you edit an optimized replica of an original image, those edits will transfer to the original raw. Overall, Mylio Photos handles its functions with such grace that there’s no reason to give its actual workings much thought.

Another benefit of this system is that once you have connected your fragmented photo libraries, you can back them up as one, either to a local disk, a cloud drive, or both.

While Mylio Photos is a subscription service, it remains surprisingly good value thanks to Mylio Drive. Mylio Drive offers unlimited Cloud storage for the optimized copies of your original images. As a result, internet-connected devices can access recent additions to your overall photo collection even when they’re not sharing the same network. While you don’t have to enable this feature for Mylio Photos to work, it makes things better and costs you nothing more.

Photo consolidation aside, Mylio Photos is a formidable photo management tool. Its implementation of Face recognition and AI keyword tagging is first-rate. Meanwhile, it has the best implementation of Geotagging I’ve used to date. However, Mylio Photos’ photo editing functionality, while responsive and mostly capable, cannot keep up with dedicated photo editing applications such as DxO PhotoLab or even all-in-one photo management and editing studios such as ACDSee Professional and Lightroom.

Therefore, if your photo collection is relatively small and mostly contained to your computer, you might prefer the all-around capabilities of ACDSee and Lightroom. But, if you’re trying to bring order to a sizeable fragmented photo collection and want to be independent of the cloud, Mylio Photos is one of the few practical solutions.

Mylio Photos is an outstanding photo management tool that can bring order to the most chaotic, large, and fragmented photo libraries. Moreover, Mylio Photos succeeds in this without utilizing the cloud or even an internet connection. This makes Mylio Photos a unique and compelling option and an easy recommendation. Try Mylio Photos Now – For Free.

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Mylio Photos

GET MYLIO PHOTOS

US$12.99 Monthly


About the Author

Richard Adams

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