Ways to use Life Capture

Your days. Their stories. Our family.

Life Capture does one thing well: a photo, and the words someone said about it, become a story you can read and keep — in an archive that stays yours. Point that at different moments in your life and it becomes a different kind of book.

Your days

The everyday journal. Take a photo, say a sentence about why it mattered, and let Studio write the day from your own words. Read it back as a monthly Journal, publish a trip or a season when you want to, or keep it entirely to yourself. Studio builds stories from what you recorded, and every draft is yours to review and edit.

Their stories: sit down with someone's albums

Some of the most important stories in a family live in one person's memory and a box of prints. Life Capture is a good way to keep both together, in that person's own voice.

  1. Sit down with the albums

    Bring your iPhone with Pocket open, and ask about the pictures that bring back the most. There is nothing to set up for them — no account, no app on their phone.

  2. Photograph each print and let them talk

    Take a photo of the print with Pocket, then record them telling its story as a voice note on that same Moment. Their words stay attached to the exact picture that prompted them — who is in it, where it was, what happened next.

  3. Tag the storyteller

    Add them as a People tag so everything they shared can be found together later, across sessions and years.

  4. Add the photos you already have

    Drag their digital photos — and yours of them — into Studio, so the old prints and the recent pictures live in the same archive.

  5. Gather it, and read it back

    Collect the session into a Post, such as “Grandma's albums.” Studio writes from what was recorded; read it and edit any sentence so it sounds the way they told it. The original recordings and transcripts are always kept.

  6. Share it the way they would like

    Publish the Post as a simple web page for the family, export the month as a PDF, or make a montage that plays their voice under each photo — never with music, just what they said.

A photographed print is dated the day you photographed it, so a session reads as the afternoon you spent together. Write the year or the occasion into a note or say it in the recording, and it stays with the photo.

Our family: one archive, many phones

One Mac at home can receive from several family iPhones. Pair each phone once on your home network; with Receive away from home turned on in Studio, photos and voice notes can keep arriving from a dorm room, a holiday trip, or a grandparent's porch two states away. Everyone's moments land in one family archive, and a collection or a monthly Journal can be shared with everyone.

Away-from-home sending needs Studio running and the Mac awake; the connection guide walks through it. Studio doesn't yet show who captured each Moment, so a shared archive works best when people add a People tag or say who they're with.

More ways it fits

A trip journal

Pocket's Road Mode can note where you stopped, privately on your iPhone, and you choose which stops become Moments. Studio maps the places, and you can publish the trip for the people who stayed home.

A childhood book

Record the things your kids say, in their own voices, under the photos they belong to. Each month's Journal exports as a PDF — a book that grows without a subscription.

Recipes in their voice

Photograph the handwritten recipe card while the cook explains the parts that were never written down.

Letters to your kids

Talk to the person who will read this one day, over photos of ordinary days. Plain files mean it will still open when they do.

Projects that take a while

A garden, a renovation, a restoration. Tag it as a Project, keep the before-and-after photos, and say what you did and why as you go.

The animals in your life

Pets make some of the best stories, and the ones you will most want to read again.

What you listened to

Flag a podcast, lecture, or sermon that stayed with you, and say in a sentence why. Months later it reads like a notebook of what shaped you.

Remembering someone

When a family loses someone, Life Capture can gather the photos and the stories people tell about them into one place, and a montage of their voices.

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