Why Balise
The collection already exists.
You photograph what you care about. Then you forget to log it. Every vertical app starts empty and dies when the habit does. Your camera roll is already full. That’s the product.
We pointed it at one roll — about 28,000 photos. What we said was: holy shit. Not another folder of pictures. The looks, the bottles, the nights. Nobody typed any of it.
Then other people’s rolls, nothing configured, and everybody had some version of the same reaction: oh, awesome. Now I can use that thing. Every roll came back a different library. Nobody told it what to care about. It worked that out from the pictures — which is the whole trick.
Balise learns the roll you already have and turns it into collections you can ask. Which watches do I actually wear. What did I drink in Shibuya, that little whisky bar. What was the name of the place with the terrace. The answer comes back with the pictures it stands on, not a grid of guesses.
Why “Balise”
Balise is French for a marker: the painted bars on a trail, or the buoy over a channel, that help you find the place again. You already leave those markers with pictures. Balise keeps what they meant.
What we built
An iPhone app. Keep Camera. Pick how far back it may look and tap import. It takes a small copy of each photo, works out what it was, and files it: the haircut, the bag, the bottle and the vintage, the watch, the restaurant, the city, the date. Screenshots and blur, it skips. Then you browse, or ask in plain words.
Apple finds the photo. Balise keeps what it meant. When it gets something wrong, you fix it in one tap. If you want to ask about something in front of you, attach a picture to the question — that’s an ask, not a new camera.
Point it at a big roll and the first album is askable in about five minutes. The rest lands over the next hours. After that it keeps up on its own — new shots get sorted as you take them, up to your plan, and one switch turns that off. Your history it only touches when you ask.
Then, while you sleep, it starts remembering at the grain a camera roll never had: the night. Trips and the places you lived are laid out first, straight off dates and places; a quiet nightly pass works out the dinners and evenings inside them. Memory shows what stood out and says why — first time, fifth return, a week away from home — and every night opens back onto the pictures it stands on. Nine photos of one dinner become one dinner. The diary you were already keeping, open at last.
And when a night is worth showing, it can leave the app as one link. Balise writes the story — title, chapters, the pictures placed — you fix a line and publish. A single bottle travels as a card, a trip as a swipeable deck, a shortlist as a page of words. The people you send it to need no app; the link is unlisted, and it comes down the moment you say.
Where this goes
Photos are one of the richest records on a phone, but most of that record never becomes useful. Balise learns from what already exists, builds the base, and hands it back to the person who made it.
Preference is never inferred from a picture alone. Balise separates visible patterns from the reactions and notes you deliberately add, and shows the evidence behind an answer.
What we refuse to build
A new logging habit. Keep using Camera. Balise comes after and learns the roll you already made.
A face yearbook. No general-purpose face-identification service and no persistent biometric graph on our servers. Anonymous grouping is opt-in and starts on your phone; the templates it needs are encrypted there and never uploaded. After import, Balise may compare faces once within temporary processing copies to merge obvious duplicate groups, then keeps only random opaque ids, alias links and the names you choose to add.
Training on your pictures. We don’t. Our providers don’t either.
A photo archive. Originals stay in Apple Photos. The iPhone encrypts a bounded processing copy before upload; a dedicated private service decrypts it for processing, and ordinary copies are deleted afterward. Connected AI stays facts-only unless you approve an exact photo request, which gives only that requesting connection one hour of access through Balise. See how photos are protected.
A hidden data bargain. Your content is not sold or used to train models. It is processed only by the vendors needed to provide Balise, all listed in the privacy policy.
Who it’s for
People who already take the picture. The one who shoots every label and never opens the app meant to log it. The woman whose roll is half outfits, salon mirrors, manicures, bags and shoes. You’ve been building the collection for years, mundane and important in the same stream. You just never got to see it.
The ask
Point it at a period you already shot. See what comes back. Then tell us what it got wrong; that is the part we want most.