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Halve

Halve app icon
Download on the App Store
Download on the Mac App Store

Halve shrinks the videos in your Photos library — in place, keeping your metadata.

Videos are the bulk of most Photos libraries, and 60fps screen recordings and 4K clips are the worst offenders. Halve scans your library for bloated videos, re-encodes them with hardware HEVC at a sensible framerate and bitrate, and swaps them back into your library with creation date, location, favorites, and album membership intact.

How it works #

  • Scan — enumerate your library and show total potential space savings.
  • Estimate — only videos with meaningful predicted savings are surfaced; already-efficient clips are skipped.
  • Re-encode — hardware HEVC re-encoding with a clean frame-rate reduction where appropriate; audio is passed through untouched.
  • Verify — the new file must be playable, duration-correct, and actually smaller, or the swap is aborted. The original video is never deleted on failure.
  • Swap — the new asset is inserted with copied metadata and album membership, then the original is removed.

Why it’s different #

Apple’s own tools can’t fix this: Photos edits are non-destructive, so trimming or editing a video never frees space. Halve is built to handle the edge cases other compressor apps get wrong — preserving dates, locations, and album membership, and being upfront about what can’t be preserved (Live Photo pairing, burst grouping, and edit history).

Privacy #

Halve runs 100% on-device. Nothing is ever uploaded — there are no analytics SDKs and no network calls beyond App Store purchase verification. Read the full privacy policy.

Platforms #

Halve is a universal app for iPhone and Mac (iOS 17+ / macOS 14+).

Status: Halve is in final testing ahead of release. Contact us if you’d like to hear when it’s available.