How it works
From a photo library to a story in your archive.
Life Capture starts where your memories already are — the photo library on your devices — and becomes a simple loop you can run every day. Here is the complete journey, in plain language, with the operational details that set correct expectations.
Day one, on your Mac
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Bring in the photos you already have
Drag photos from Photos or the Finder straight into Studio, or pick them from your library without giving Studio access to anything else. There's no export step and no empty archive to fill from scratch — your first material is the life you've already photographed.
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Watch them become days
Studio groups what you bring in into Moments and days using the dates the photos already carry, and adds each one to your local archive — plain folders and files on your Mac. Originals are copied in untouched; everything Studio derives is written alongside them.
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Let Studio organize and understand
On your Mac — and only on your Mac — Studio reads photos with Apple Vision, transcribes any voice with Apple Speech, and gathers each day's Moments in order with their places and, where available, the day's weather. Analysis is grounded in the evidence a Moment actually holds: the photos, voice, text, dates, and locations.
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Review, edit, journal, collect, export, or publish
Read each day's written story and make it yours. Gather days into the monthly Journal, follow tags across your whole archive, export a PDF, or publish a collection as static web pages. Every one of those is a deliberate action — nothing is shared by default.
Going forward, with Pocket
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Capture new moments as they happen
On your iPhone or iPad, capture a photo, video with sound, voice note, or written note. Pocket works entirely offline and needs no account. Each capture is kept together as one Moment.
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Add voice, text, or tags — when you want to
Say a few words about the photo you just took, type a line, or tag the people and places involved. Context belongs to the specific photo or video that prompted it — the detail your camera roll never held. Adding nothing is fine too.
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Send the Moment to your Mac
Pair Pocket with Studio once using the six-digit code shown on your Mac. After that, Moments travel encrypted over your own local or private network. If your Mac isn't reachable, captures queue on the device and deliver automatically when it is. There is no Life Capture cloud relay, and AirDrop is always available as a manual path. Full connection guide
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Keep control of the original archive
The archive stays yours: inspectable files you can read without Studio, move to another drive, and back up with Time Machine like anything else. Deleting a Moment keeps its original bytes in Recently Deleted until you permanently delete them.
What Life Capture doesn't do
Setting expectations honestly is part of the design:
- No continuous cloud sync — transfer happens between your devices, on your network
- No account, no analytics, no third-party AI services
- No invented memories — writing is assembled from what you recorded
- No silent sharing — publishing and export only happen when you choose them
- No remote recall — once something is shared or exported, copies held by others are theirs