Archipic
A private photo journal for architects.
Architects and students notice buildings everywhere: a façade on a walk, a joint at an exhibition, a plan in a book, a model on a desk. Archipic keeps those photos in a searchable archive. Take the picture, tap twice to say what it shows, and it is filed.
Free · iPhone and iPad · iOS 17 or later
Capture
Fast enough to use while walking.
Archipic has its own camera, with a grid, a level, aspect-ratio guides, tap-to-focus and exposure, pinch zoom and a set of film-inspired colour looks. It records video as well as stills. The Action Button, Siri or a Shortcut can open the camera directly, and a Shortcut can send every shot into a named project.
Tags, not typing
A small, fixed vocabulary. Two taps per photo.
Building
The whole thing
Typology (residential, office, public, commercial, civic, hospitality, heritage, industrial, landscape), room and concepts.
Element
A part of it
Structure, openings, envelope, finishes and details, with materials and colours.
Graphic
A flat reference
Artwork, book, drawing, plan, render, model or web page. Photograph a book page or a wall label and the app suggests the title, author and year, read on the phone itself.
Optional fields hold the author and year, a note, the place, keywords and a rating from one to five. You switch on only the ones you use. The date and location come from the phone, so you never type them. Because the vocabulary is fixed, the archive stays searchable years later.
Find it again
By date, by what it is, by project or by place.
Four views sort the same archive. Search covers every tag, and filters narrow it by type, project, favourites or rating. Pinch the grid to show more or fewer photos per row.
- Time: the whole archive in date order
- Reference: grouped by what is in the photo
- Project: a site visit or study trip in one place
- Place: pinned on a map
- Search and filters across every tag
Boards
Lay out a selection for print or for a feed.
Choose some photos and Archipic arranges them as a gallery-wall poster at B1 or A2, a chronological A4 journal, or a square, portrait or story image. Captions come from the tags. Posters and journals export as PDF, the others as images ready to post.
In and out
It works with the apps you already use.
References from elsewhere come in through the share sheet. Photos going out carry their tags as standard metadata, so the tagging you did is still there in your other software.
- Share an image from Photos, Files or Messages, or a screenshot, to save it
- Keywords, caption, title and rating open in Lightroom, Bridge and InDesign
- The capture date goes with the photo
- One setting keeps or removes the location
iPad
The same archive on a larger screen.
On iPad the four views move into a sidebar and the grid fills the page. The Board composer splits in two, with your photos on one side and a live preview of the board on the other. Everything syncs with your iPhone through iCloud.
Private by design
Your photos are yours.
The archive is stored on your device and syncs through your own iCloud. There is no account and no developer server, so there is nowhere else for it to go. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected.
- No account, no sign-in
- No ads, no analytics, no tracking
- No developer server; sync runs through your iCloud
- The developer cannot see your photos
- Made by an architect