Help with Life Capture.

What's new in Studio 1.3.5#

The current Mac App Store release. If something below doesn't match what you see, check that the App Store has updated Studio to 1.3.5.

• Video in your journal. A clip's poster opens in the lightbox and plays right there; if the clip has words you can play them from the pull-quote, and a silent clip says so. In a day's page a video opens the same way a tagged photo does — see video and montages.
• Make a Montage. Turn any Post into a short video: your photos in order, your own words on screen, your voice notes under their moments, clips with their own sound, and never any music. File › Make a Montage… (⇧⌘M) — see video and montages.
• Publish video, honestly. A published clip is transcoded for the web and stripped of location and identifying data first. A single-file publish carries the poster and says the video was left out. A published montage becomes the Post's lead video — see publishing.
• Photo descriptions know the time and the place. "The river at dusk" rather than "a river", without inventing what isn't in the picture; tag a photo and Refresh regenerates its description — see photo descriptions.
• Small things. Published weather sits beneath the story; artwork Studio reclaimed from your device never lands in a Post as if it were your photo; Help opens this page.
• Much faster on real archives (since 1.3.2). Saving a day used to take minutes on a large archive; it is now effectively instant. Opening days and moving between them is quick even with years of Moments, and the Tags, Posts, and Places views no longer drag.
• Studio tells you when it's still working (since 1.3.2). While imported captures wait to be processed, a count shows how many remain and clears when the queue drains — see while Studio is writing your day.
• Places map (since 1.3.2). The Places view opens on a map of where your life happened, with a digest for each place — see places, tags, and posts.
• Your words on any Moment (since 1.3.2). Attach what you want to say to any Moment, not only the day; the day's story reads from your words, never a trimmed preview — see notes and your own words.
• Notes (since 1.3.1). Write a note straight into any day, pick the day it belongs to, and edit it in place with your originals preserved.
• Better writing (since 1.3.2). The story no longer says the same thing twice in different words, and your own style survives the editing pass.
• Honest photo-description statuses (since 1.3.2). Reprocessing never downgrades a description it can't regenerate, and Refresh Photo Descriptions says exactly what it did — see photo descriptions.

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.

Reading your archive without Studio#

Your archive is ordinary files, so you can always open the folders, photos, JSON, and Markdown with whatever you already have. Beyond that, the archive format is being written down in the open as the Open Life Archive (OLA) specification, and there is an independent, open-source reader for it: Open Life Reader on GitHub (Apache-2.0).

Open Life Reader is read-only. It lets you choose an archive folder, browse it, open your original media, and search locally — with no account, no telemetry, and no network access. It's built to prove that the archive is not tied to one app or operating system; Life Capture Studio is one producer and consumer of the format, not its owner.

Where it stands today: the specification is a working draft and the reader is at the development stage — developed and tested on macOS, expected to run on Linux and Windows but not yet fully tested there, and no release or conformance claim has been made. Treat it as a way to check that your archive stays yours, not as a replacement for Studio. Issues and contributions are welcome on the repository.

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
• If Pocket never finds your Mac, reset the iPhone's Local Network permission: Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network → Life Capture, off and then on again. iOS can keep a stale permission after an update, and it looks on while blocking discovery
• 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.

While Studio is writing your day#

Captures arrive in Studio quickly, but each one is then processed in turn — transcription, photo understanding, and the day's story — and with the optional vision model turned on, a photo can take a minute or two. Studio shows a count of captures still waiting and clears it when the queue drains, so a day that fills in one Moment at a time isn't missing anything; it's still being written. The count never exceeds reality, and nothing is lost while work remains.

Saving a day is effectively instant on archives of any size, and the app shows honest progress while it composes. If a status says something failed, the failure is the last word — you can retry from the same place.

Notes and your own words#

Some days don't leave photos. Choose Write a Note from the File menu (⇧⌘N) or from any day's page, type what happened, and pick the day it belongs to — today or any day past. The sheet says in plain words which day you're adding to; notes use the current time today and noon for past days unless you choose a time; and because the journal records life rather than plans, future dates aren't selectable.

You can also attach your own words to any Moment, not just to a day. A pencil sits under every note, moment text, and day story: edit in place, and the Moment and the day's story update. Edited text is marked "Edited by you," and your original words are always preserved in the archive, untouched.

Your words are canonical. The day's story reads from what you actually wrote — a typed note is shown whole, and a Moment's short preview is an excerpt on a sentence or word boundary, never a mid-word cut. Anything you write yourself outranks anything Studio generates.

Places, tags, and posts#

Three views look across your whole archive. Places opens on a map of where your Moments happened, with a digest for each place and its story beneath. Tags follows one thread — a person, a pet, a trip, a project — across every Moment that carries it. Posts lists the stories you've composed from any combination of tags and days. All three are built for large archives and stay responsive as it grows.

The map needs location data: Moments captured with location in Pocket, or photos that carry GPS in their metadata, appear on it; everything else still shows in the other views.

Photo descriptions#

Studio describes photos with Apple Vision by default. On an Apple Silicon Mac with 16 GB or more you can turn on richer descriptions in Settings, which downloads an open vision model once (about 6 GB) and then runs it entirely on your Mac. Descriptions can use the time and place a photo was taken and the tags you give it — name a pet, and the descriptions use the name.

Refresh Photo Descriptions regenerates descriptions for the photos you choose, promoting basic descriptions to richer ones when the model is available. Reprocessing never replaces a description with a worse one it can't regenerate; if a refresh is declined or a photo fails, the status says exactly what happened, and a failed attempt can be retried. A busy Mac is reported as busy, not as a problem with your photos. Anything you wrote yourself is never overwritten.

Video and montages#

A video you captured in Pocket arrives in Studio as a Moment with a poster frame. Click the poster in the lightbox to play the clip in place; press Escape once to stop, again to close. If the clip has spoken words they are transcribed like a voice note and can be played from the day's pull-quote. A clip with no sound is labeled that way rather than left looking broken.

A montage is a Post rendered as a video. Choose File › Make a Montage… (⇧⌘M) on any Post: your photos appear once each, in order; your own words appear on screen as they come up; voice notes play under the moments they belong to; clips keep their own sound. Studio never adds music. Generated descriptions stay off screen unless you turn them on. While it renders, the progress you see is the real encode. When it's done, play it on the Post, reveal the file, or share it. If you edit the Post afterwards, Studio marks the montage out of date and remakes it when you ask. A tall 9:16 cut and a second typography theme are available in the same sheet, and Reduce Motion is respected.

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 on the Places map — 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. When enabled, Weather sends the date and location to Apple WeatherKit, and Place Names sends coordinates to Apple’s geocoder. Both start enabled and can be turned off in Settings. Neither lookup includes your photos, voice, or writing. The optional model download and paired-device transfers also use the network; see the privacy policy for each data flow.

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.

Video is published only if you include it. A published clip is transcoded for the web and stripped of location and identifying metadata before it leaves your archive. If you publish a single file instead of a folder, the page carries the poster and says plainly that the video was left out. A montage you include becomes the Post's lead video on the page.

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 required. Capture and installed on-device processing work offline. Weather and place-name lookups and model downloads need internet access; paired-device transfer needs a reachable connection to your Mac.

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.