Getting started

Open it from the line under the Gallery’s header, from Organize › Getting Started, or from Settings › About. Each row shows a tick when it is done; swipe a row left to skip it for now. The rows are the loop Livo is built around: bring photos in, say who is in them and what happened, make a Memory, seal it, and open it where no Livo exists.

1. Bring in your photos

Point Livo at your Camera Roll. Livo makes small copies and leaves your photos where they are; it never deletes or changes them. Livo asks for permission to your photos when the import starts. See Bringing in your photos.

2. Name the people

In the Gallery, open a Moment (one day’s photos) and tap the tag icon in its header. Tag the Moment opens on People: tap who is in these photos, then Apply. Select the photos a person is not in and tap their minus chip to take them off. The arrows move to the next Moment. See Tag the Moment and Naming the faces.

3. Name an event, add a line of story

Give the day a name (“Zoo trip”, “Thanksgiving 2019”) and, when you like, a sentence about it. The event and its story go into every photo of the Moment, into your capsules and into search. See Events and the story.

4. Seal your first capsule

Make a Memory first: select photos in the Gallery and tap Make a Memory, or open a Moment and tap Make a Memory of these. Then go to Capsules (the shield on the bottom bar) and tap Seal: pick the Memories to put in, name the capsule, and seal it. Under Keep a copy, choose where copies go (a folder in Files or iCloud Drive). See Time Capsules.

5. Open it on your computer

Find the capsule’s folder where you kept a copy, or share it to yourself, and open START HERE - open with any web browser.html: a page with the Memories, photos, people and stories. Open any photo in the folder and the names, story and place are written into the photo itself, where Apple Photos, Windows and other apps show them. This is the point of Livo: what you know about these photos leaves with them, in plain files, and will still read in thirty years.

6. Where things are

A short tour of Livo’s three surfaces and the book. See Where things are.

Your name and your look

Two more things worth a minute, both in Settings: your name, which is stamped on every capsule you seal and signs your stories (typing it also makes you a Person, so you can tag yourself), and your look, one of five palettes, dark or light.