Questions people ask first

Balise is a marker over the photos you already take. It reads your roll — the wrist shot, the whisky bar, the sky over Norway — and keeps what each picture meant, as text you can search and ask.

Apple keeps the pictures. Balise keeps the marks.

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

No. Photos finds the picture. Balise keeps what it meant — the name on the bottle, the maker of the watch, the fish, the bar, and how it fits with the last ten times.

Leave your email on the homepage. We let people in from the waitlist in small waves and send you an invite when it’s your turn. No newsletter energy.

An iPhone on iOS 17 or later.

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

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 we tell you when a round is done.

Photos that live only in iCloud have to be downloaded first. That’s the slow part.

No. Your pictures stay in Apple Photos. We upload a small copy of each photo you include so the model can read it, then delete it — when the batch is done, and never later than a day.

What we keep is the facts, as text. Yours. The whole story is on the privacy page.

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.

No face yearbook. We don’t build a who’s-who of the people in your pictures. The one thing it learns is you: a single reference from your selfies, made on your phone, so it can tell “me” from “someone else” in a shot. It lives in your account and goes when you delete everything.

On Google Cloud and Vertesia, both in their US regions today; Vertesia holds the knowledge and the AI plumbing. Sign-in runs through Clerk. The models that read 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@groupe-tamara.com and we do it. Closed sign-in accounts are pruned every week.

Whatever you actually shoot. Bottles and labels. Wrist shots. Outfits. 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 reading of one photo.

“What was I wearing at that beach party in Brazil?” “The whisky bar in Tokyo — which night?” “What did I catch in Patagonia?”

You remember a scrap. The mark has the story.

Yes, and it stays free: your most recent 250 photos are read and askable for as long as you like, and the first two weeks read 2,500. Paid plans go by the size of your photo library, from $6.99 a month. Apple shows the price before you buy.

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.

BRK, the app studio of Groupe Tamara, in Paris. Eric writes the code and answers the email: apps@groupe-tamara.com.