Questions people ask first

Leave your email on the homepage and tell us what fills your camera roll. We invite iPhone users in small waves and email the invitation and setup steps when it’s your turn. Free for 90 days; nothing converts to paid automatically.

An iPhone on iOS 17 or later. Balise works with the Camera and Photos you already have — no new camera app.

Bring in a few hundred photos from the last year or two; the app samples evenly across the period you pick. Then open Collections and ask the first thing you would ask a friend who was there: which night, what was in the glass, where that little place was.

The first round — a few hundred photos — lands in a few minutes. A big roll keeps going in the background over the next hours, and the app tells you when a round is done. Collections fill first; Memory writes up the days afterwards, usually overnight.

Photos that live only in iCloud have to be downloaded first. That’s the slow part. Your iPhone encrypts a small processing copy before upload, Balise takes its notes, and the ordinary copy is deleted afterward. Your originals stay in Apple Photos.

Tell us what it found that was useful, and what it missed. Reply to the invitation email, or write to apps@usebalise.com — a person answers. A screenshot of the collection or the answer, and what you expected instead, is the most useful thing you can send.

Not yet. iPhone first. Leave your email anyway and we’ll tell you when.

Balise is a marker over the photos you already take. It learns your roll and keeps what each picture meant, so you can ask: which night, what was in that look, what you’d order.

Apple keeps the pictures. Balise keeps the marks.

No. Keep Camera. Take pictures the way you already do. Balise learns the library afterwards.

No. Photos finds the picture. Balise keeps what it meant — the haircut, nail colour, bag or shoes; the name on the bottle, the fish, the bar, and how it fits with the last ten times.

Your originals stay in Apple Photos. Your iPhone encrypts a bounded processing copy before upload. A dedicated private service decrypts it for processing, and ordinary copies are deleted afterward. The facts stay as text. Yours.

Your assistant may request up to 24 exact photos. Balise shows every selection in the app and sends nothing unless you approve it; approval gives only that requesting connection one hour of access through Balise. The hour ending does not erase a photo already delivered to your assistant. Read how your photos are protected and the full privacy policy.

Yes. Open Profile → Claude & ChatGPT and choose the AI app you use. Claude opens with Balise and its private connector address already filled in. ChatGPT opens its setup page with the address copied while Balise is under directory review. Add the connector and sign in. Facts only by default, and it changes nothing except a List you approve.

Photo access is approved one request at a time. Your assistant may request up to 24 exact photos. Every selection appears in Balise for approval or denial within 10 minutes. Approval gives only that requesting connection access through Balise for one hour; fetching a photo again does not extend the hour, and later selections need another approval. Each response carries at most four images. The hour ending does not erase a photo already delivered to your assistant.

Yes. Connected, it can list your Stories — drafts and published, newest first — and open one whole: the sections in order, the captions, the photographs it leans on, and the live link if there is one.

Facts travel by default. The pictures inside a Story require approval as an exact photo request, and it can’t publish, edit or take down a Story — it can hand you the link that opens it in Balise.

Never. Not us, not the AI providers we use. It’s written into the privacy policy and the terms.

Not album by album yet. Today you choose how many photos and which period, and the app samples evenly across it. Hidden and shared albums always stay out.

If you want to hand-pick, give Balise limited Photos access in iOS and choose the photos in Apple’s sheet.

Off by default. Flip the switch if you want the receipts, the chats, the screenshot you swore you’d need.

There is no cloud face yearbook, and People is opt-in. Your phone creates anonymous recurring-person groups; after an import, Balise may compare faces once inside the same temporary processing copies to merge obvious duplicate groups. The model cannot name anyone or create identities, and Balise retains no cloud face crops, templates, or embeddings.

You can name or merge entries and explicitly mark which one is you. A name stays your private label and may accompany the same opaque reference as temporary context when a future matched photo is described.

On Google Cloud and Vertesia, both in their US regions today; Vertesia holds the knowledge and the AI plumbing. Sign-in is through the methods on the sign-in screen. The models that look at the copies are OpenAI’s and Google’s Gemini, through Vertesia.

The full list, with what each one sees, is in the privacy policy.

Yes. In the app: Profile → Balise data → Delete all Balise data. It wipes what we learned, any copies we still hold and the import history, right away. Your Apple Photos don’t change.

To close the sign-in account itself, email apps@usebalise.com and we do it. Closed sign-in accounts are pruned every week.

Whatever you actually shoot. Outfits, haircuts, nails, bags and shoes. Bottles and labels. Wrist shots. Receipts and menus. Tables and dishes. Catches. Places, churches, cars. Skies.

It works out your domains from your roll — not from a list we picked for you.

It will, sometimes. Correct it or delete it in the app. Don’t make an important decision on a machine’s take on one photo.

“Which watches do I actually wear?” “What did I drink in Shibuya — that little whisky bar?” “That little bag in Paris — which day?”

You remember a scrap. That’s enough.

Home opens on the week Balise wrote, set on one of its own photographs. Under it: what just came in, then Days — the shelf of days it has written up, with a “Tell a story” door on the ones it hasn’t. Then your shelves.

Collections are the things, four ways in: Things, Time, Places and People — the bottles and the watches, the months, the bars and cities, the people who keep showing up. Memory is the nights. Balise works out the occasions behind your photos while you sleep, and writes up the ones that stood out — each with the reason it’s there. No reason, no story.

It’s the diary you were already keeping, a photo at a time. Open a day and you land back on the pictures it stands on.

Dates and places, before any AI runs. You were home, then you weren’t, then you were again — that’s a trip. Same for where you lived. The clever part comes after, on a spine that’s just facts.

No. Photographing something isn’t owning it, drinking it or loving it — a shop window proves nothing. Liked, own, drank, want: those marks are yours to add, and they’re the only thing Balise calls preference. Without them, the most it will say is that you keep coming back.

Someone pointed Balise at their own camera roll, liked what came back, and published that one card, deck, story or list at a link. What you saw is everything they published — the rest of their photo library stays private. No account, no app, nothing to accept.

Cards, decks and stories are unlisted: search engines are told to stay out, and only people with the link find them. A profile page is private until its owner picks unlisted or public, and only a public one may be indexed. Nothing else Balise publishes ever is.

A small home at usebalise.com for everything you already published — cards, recaps, stories, and lists — with a few you choose to feature on top. People can follow it. Turning it on never publishes the rest of your photos or memory.

Following you means a notification when you publish a new story, card or list. Nothing else, and never your photos. A usebalise.com/@handle link opens the page, and opens the app if you have it.

How a Story leaves Balise for Instagram or X. Tap Post and three things land: the Story’s originals go into the Balise album in Photos, in Story order. A caption — Instagram, or an X thread — goes on the clipboard. And a published Story gets a cover for your Instagram story, sized for it, with a QR to its page.

Nothing posts by itself. Balise lines up the pieces; you post them.

Yes — and it travels well. One bottle as a card. A trip as a swipeable recap. A night as a story Balise wrote and you touched up. A list, when only the words should leave. Each publishes at its own link that unfurls in iMessage, WhatsApp, X, wherever.

Nothing is published until you publish it, and the people you send it to need no app.

Any time, in the app. The page comes down with it; from then on the link answers, plainly, that it was taken down. We don’t pretend it never existed — the link was real — but what was on it is gone.

The whole thing, free for 90 days. Nothing converts to paid automatically. Then Trace is $4.99 a month and Blaze is $9.99; yearly plans save about 20% and include history credits. Apple shows the exact local price before purchase.

The sizes, the yearly price and the small print are on the plans page.

Keep the app open, on Wi‑Fi, for a first big round; iOS slows background work on low battery. If your photos live in iCloud, each one has to come down first.

Still stuck after an hour? Email us with your account email and roughly when it stopped.

Balise, Inc. Delaware, Tokyo and Paris.
2093 Philadelphia Pike #3795, Claymont, DE 19703, United States.
1 Chome-23-5 Higashiazabu, Minato City, Tokyo 106-0044, Japan.
2-4 rue Jules Lefebvre, 75009 Paris, France.
One person writes the code and answers apps@usebalise.com.