Encore · FAQ

Encore reads your photo library on your iPhone and picks out the stretches worth watching again — a trip, the day you shot the most, this day last year, a place you never went back to, the thing you keep photographing — then plays them back in time with a rhythm. The problem it solves isn't that you didn't take good photos; it's that you never open them again.

No. Reading, scoring, grouping, and playback all happen on your device. No photo, thumbnail, or derived image is ever sent to our servers or to any third party, and there is no account to sign up for. Encore only reads your library — it never deletes, modifies, or moves your photos.

It uses the coordinates already attached to your photos, so it can tell a trip apart from an ordinary day at home and judge how rare a place is for you. Before any of that, coordinates are reduced to a coarse grid cell a few kilometres across — only the cell is kept and compared. Encore never stores your exact coordinates and never transmits location data.

It combines three things: how rare a moment is for you (a place you go once a year counts far more than your living room), how good the photos are technically and aesthetically, and how many there are. Rarity is a multiplier, not a bonus — that's why one afternoon somewhere new can outrank a hundred photos from home.

Because a recap that can't explain itself is just a shuffle. Every reason Encore shows — "the only time you went there in 2024", "42 shots that day" — is a fact drawn from your own library's metadata that you can check. Encore never invents praise, and it makes no judgment about your life or the people in your photos.

No. Encore does not perform face recognition and does not group photos by who is in them.

Encore will tell you plainly that its picks would come from a hand-picked subset and would therefore be misleading. Rarity, density, and "you never went back" all depend on seeing the whole library; with partial access the answers would be quietly wrong, so Encore says so instead of pretending.

Yes. Open any stretch, tap the adjust button, and you'll see every frame in it as a contact sheet. Tap a frame to drop it — dropped frames stay visible but crossed out, so you can always put them back. You can also switch the rhythm, and the app shows you how long each rhythm will run before you pick one.

They change how far back you're standing. "Moment" is seconds to a day, "cut" is one outing, "year" spans seasons, and "always" ignores years entirely (a colour you keep shooting, a thing you keep coming back to). Pinch the shelf to move between them, or tap the marks directly.

Browsing everything Encore selects from your library, and watching any of it in the app, are free and unlimited. That's part of the product's design, not a promotion.

That will happen. Encore works from what your library's metadata can support — time, place, density, image quality — and none of that knows which day changed your life. It's a way to find things you'd forgotten, not a ranking of your memories.

Encore requires iOS 17 or later on iPhone.

Settings → Feedback sends us a message directly from the app, or email [email protected].