Help with Life Capture.

Getting started with Pocket#

Install Life Capture Pocket from the App Store — it's free and needs no account. Capture a photo, video, voice note, or written note; each capture is kept together as one Moment. Add your voice or tags while the memory is fresh, or don't — a photograph can stand on its own. Everything stays on your device until you send it to your Mac.

Your Studio archive#

On first launch, Life Capture Studio sets up an archive for you — there is nothing to configure. The archive is a plain folder of ordinary files (your originals plus JSON and Markdown that Studio writes alongside them). You can open an existing archive from another Mac or drive, and move the archive anywhere you like: it's yours, and it's readable without Studio.

Sending Moments to Studio#

Pair once: in Studio, open Settings → Receive from iPhone → Pair a device, then type the six-digit code from your Mac's screen into Pocket. From then on, Moments transfer directly from your iPhone to your Mac whenever both are on the same network — automatically, encrypted, with no server in between.

Away from home, provide your own private network (Tailscale is a straightforward free option) and transfers work the same way — including over cellular. If your Mac isn't reachable, Pocket queues captures and delivers them when the connection returns. You can also export pending captures and send the bundle by AirDrop.

The complete pairing walkthrough, including manual address entry and troubleshooting, is in the connection guide.

Import troubleshooting#

If a transfer doesn't appear in Studio:

• Check Pocket's library — each Moment shows its transfer state, so you can see what's pending
• Confirm both devices are on the same network and Studio is running
• Pocket keeps captures safely queued until Studio confirms receipt — nothing is lost while waiting
• If a specific import seems incomplete, try it again; imports are safe to retry

If something still looks wrong, email [email protected] with the step you took, the capture type, and what you expected — concrete details help a lot.

Camera and microphone permissions#

Pocket asks for camera and microphone access the first time you capture a photo, video, or voice note — that's what capturing requires, and the recordings stay on your device. Location access is optional and only used to keep a place with your Moments. On the Mac, Studio asks for microphone access only if you record a voice annotation there, and macOS will prompt the first time on-device speech recognition is used. You can review or change any of these later in Settings on either device.

Location and weather#

If a Moment carries a location, Studio can show where life happened — in day headers and the Places view — and can include the day's weather alongside the story. Weather appears in Days and in the Journal where a day has a location to look up.

Weather data is provided by Apple Weather through Apple's WeatherKit service. The required Apple Weather attribution and a link to Apple's data sources are shown wherever weather appears. Weather lookup is the one network request in the system, made to Apple — never carrying your photos, voice, or words — and it only happens for days that have location data.

Deleting and restoring Moments#

Removing a Moment moves it to Recently Deleted, where its original bytes are retained until you permanently delete them. From Recently Deleted you can restore a Moment intact or delete it permanently — permanent deletion removes the data from your archive for good.

Deletion and retraction are local-first, and Studio is honest about the boundary: it removes things from your archive and your published output, but it cannot delete copies already held by recipients, exported folders, Apple Photos, backups, or captures still on an iPhone.

Publishing and unpublishing#

Publishing is always a deliberate act. When you publish a collection, Studio generates static web pages you can host or share however you like — nothing is published automatically, and there is no Life Capture server involved.

Unpublishing removes the story from your published output the next time you publish. As with deletion, copies that readers have already saved are beyond any app's reach — Life Capture tells you this rather than pretending otherwise.

Voice transcription#

Transcription runs on your Mac using Apple Speech — recordings are never sent anywhere. It needs a supported macOS version, a matching language, and Apple's local speech assets installed. Until those are ready, a capture may show a placeholder; the transcript fills in once the on-device assets are available.

Backing up your archive#

Because the archive is ordinary files, back it up like anything else: include it in Time Machine, copy the folder to another drive, or use any backup tool you already trust. Restoring is just as ordinary — the archive works wherever you put it.

System requirements#

• Life Capture Pocket: iPhone or iPad with iOS/iPadOS 18 or later — free
• Life Capture Studio: any Mac with macOS 14 Sonoma or later — one-time purchase
• The richest story writing uses Apple Intelligence on macOS 26 with Apple Silicon; on other Macs, Studio composes a faithful story from the same evidence
• No account and no internet connection required (weather lookup, when a day has a location, is the one optional network request)

Contact#

Life Capture is made by Gregory Stoltz. Email is the best way to get help, report a bug, or ask a question: [email protected]. You'll get a reply from a real person.