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This almost always means Waypost doesn't have permission to read your Photo Library. To check and fix:

1. Open the iOS Settings app.
2. Go to Privacy & Security → Photos → Waypost.
3. Set access to All Photos (recommended) or Limited Access. If it's set to "None," Waypost has no photos to organize.
4. Return to Waypost. New photos and any newly-visible photos are picked up automatically the next time you open the app or bring it back to the foreground — a "Photo scan complete" summary will appear once the scan finishes.

Limited Access means Waypost only sees the specific photos you picked when you first granted access. Even if you took those photos years ago, Waypost can still see them — but every other photo in your library is invisible to Waypost until you expand the selection.

Option 1: Add more photos to the Limited selection (stays Limited Access):

1. Open the iOS Settings app.
2. Go to Privacy & Security → Photos → Waypost.
3. Tap Edit Selected Photos… and pick the additional photos you want Waypost to see.
4. Return to Waypost. The newly-selected photos are picked up automatically — you don't need to do anything else.

Option 2: Switch to All Photos (recommended for the full Waypost experience):

1. Open the iOS Settings app.
2. Go to Privacy & Security → Photos → Waypost.
3. Tap All Photos.
4. iOS may briefly relaunch Waypost when you switch to All Photos — this is normal. You'll see a "Welcome back, scanning new photos" splash while Waypost reads the photos that just became visible to it.

Either way, Waypost runs event detection on the newly-visible photos automatically. New events are created where appropriate, existing events may pick up additional photos, and a "Photo scan complete" summary tells you exactly what changed.

What about revoking access? If you go the other direction — deselecting photos in Edit Selected Photos… or switching from All Photos to None — Waypost detects this on its next scan and removes those photos from the events they belonged to. If an event ends up with no remaining photos, Waypost will flag it in the summary so you can decide whether to delete the event.

Waypost identifies travel events by reading the photo metadata (like GPS) that your iPhone normally attaches to each photo. If a photo is missing that information, Waypost can't tell a trip apart from a day at home, so the event defaults to Home.

Photos taken on an iPhone with the built-in Camera app include this information automatically, but only if Camera Location Services is enabled:

1. Open the iOS Settings app.
2. Go to Privacy & Security → Location Services and make sure Location Services is On.
3. Scroll to Camera and set it to While Using the App.

This only affects photos taken after you change the setting. Photos taken without this information — or photos imported from another phone, scans, AirDrops, or non-Apple services that didn't include it — can't be updated by Waypost after the fact. The information simply isn't attached to the photo.

For past trips that are wrongly classified as Home, open the event from the Timeline, tap Edit Details in the nav bar, then choose Change Event Category. Pick ✈️ Travel (or 🏠 Home for the reverse case) — the current classification is shown with a ✓ next to it. Waypost remembers your override across future scans and won't auto-reclassify the event. If you change your mind later, the same menu offers Reset to Automatic to drop the override and let Waypost decide again from the photo metadata.

During setup, Waypost offers to connect your device calendar so it can name your photo groups for you instead of you typing each one. It helps in two ways: it recognizes birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays that fall on your photos' dates, and it also borrows the name of any meaningful event already on your calendar — a concert, a trip, a wedding, a party — whenever that event lines up with photos you took around the same time. iOS will ask permission to read your calendars; tap Continue to allow it. Connecting is optional — you can skip it and add event names by hand.

After connecting, Waypost walks you through three quick checklists — birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays — built from what it finds in your calendar. Nothing is used unless you check it. Holidays are grouped by category (Federal & Major, Cultural & Seasonal, and religious traditions) so you can opt into just the ones you observe; the religious-tradition categories start unselected. (Those one-off calendar events — the concert or trip — don't need a checklist; Waypost matches them to your photos automatically when the dates line up.)

You can change all of this later under Settings → Birthdays, Settings → Anniversaries, and Settings → Holidays. The Holidays screen has a 📅 Find holidays from my calendar button to re-pull the list at any time. If you skipped the calendar during setup, these same screens let you add everything by hand.

Your calendar stays private. Waypost only reads event titles and dates to derive names — it never writes to your calendar, and nothing from your calendar is ever sent to Waypost. As with photos, it all stays on your device.

The free tier is full-featured for browsing and basic editing:

• Timeline, Pin Map, and Event Detail for browsing every event.
• Search and year filters on the Timeline.
• Edit any event — rename, change date, change location, move photos, swipe-to-delete.
• Photo dedupe (all three options).
• Sharing events as .waypost bundles via texting platforms, Mail, AirDrop, etc.
• Earning Waypost Passport stamps as you travel (everyone collects stamps; only opening the book itself is premium — see below).
• Automatic iCloud backups, and sync across your own devices (iPhone and iPad) — see Sync & multiple devices.

Premium features (Waypost Premium):

• Animated Travel — an animated globe with two modes: World Tour sweeps the camera around the planet and drops a pin on every destination, or Journey traces year-by-year arcs between your trips with an airplane or vehicle sprite following the path.
• Sharing Animated Travel as a link — recipient opens it in their browser.
• Pin Map visit targets — mark countries or states as places you want to visit; targets are highlighted on the globe.
• Travel destination celebrations — a subtle bounce when a new pin lands on the Pin Map, plus a confetti burst when the event reaches a targeted region.
• Passport book — open the book to flip through your country and city stamps.
• Slideshow — curated highlight reel from your events, with year and Home/Travel filters.
• Merge Events — combine multiple events into one.
• Rename Many — bulk-rename a batch of events at once.
• Send as captioned photo — handwritten caption on a single photo.
• Send as Postcard — front/back postcard composer with handwritten message.
• Create Apple Photo Album — gather photos into Apple Photos albums to use with third-party print services like Shutterfly, Walgreens, and Mpix.

When you complete onboarding, Waypost gives you a 14-day free trial of every premium feature. Apple confirms the trial with a Face ID prompt; no payment method is needed and you're not charged anything during or after the trial. The trial is mandatory at install (no skip path) so we can give every user the same chance to try the features.

After 14 days, premium features lock and the free tier (above) keeps working forever at no cost. To unlock premium permanently, choose one of three options from the in-app paywall:

• Monthly subscription
• Annual subscription
• Lifetime — one-time payment

Save 33% if you choose within 3 days of trial end. The discount window is shown automatically on the paywall during those 3 days. After that, standard pricing applies.

Open Settings within Waypost and tap Manage Subscription. That deep-links to iOS Settings → Subscriptions, where you can cancel, switch between monthly and annual, or change billing. Apple handles all subscription management; cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period.

If you bought the Lifetime unlock, there's nothing to cancel — it's a one-time purchase. The Lifetime row in Settings will simply show "Lifetime Member."

Open Settings within Waypost and tap Restore Purchases. This re-checks your purchase with Apple and applies the entitlement to the current device. Make sure you're signed in with the same Apple ID you originally purchased with.

Two icons in the Timeline header keep things tidy until you need them:

• Tap the magnifying glass to reveal a search bar — type any part of an event name or location.
• Tap the funnel to reveal a row of year chips — tap a year to show only events from that year. Tap All to clear.

A small blue dot above an icon means a filter is active there. Tap the icon again to collapse it.

Swipe left on any event card or row in the Timeline. A red delete area appears as you swipe; release past the threshold to confirm, or swipe back to cancel. Deleting an event removes Waypost's record of the event but does not delete the underlying photos — they stay in your Apple Photo Library, just like they were before.

Sometimes a single detected event covers two separate things — e.g., a wedding rehearsal and the wedding itself. To split:

1. Open the event from the Timeline.
2. Tap the Add or remove photos icon in the nav bar.
3. From the Manage Photos menu, choose Move Photos.
4. Tap each photo that should move; selected photos get a check badge.
5. Tap Move in the top right to confirm.
6. Pick a destination: ← Previous event or → Next event (the chronologically adjacent events on your Timeline), or + Create new to make a fresh event for the moved photos. The new event suggests a name based on the source event (e.g., "Wedding (split)") which you can edit before confirming.

Waypost re-derives each event's date range from its remaining photos. If you move every photo out of an event, the source event is removed automatically.

If Waypost split one trip into two adjacent events, you can combine them:

1. From the Timeline, tap the Merge Events tile in the premium row. Multi-select mode activates and a checkbox appears next to every event.
2. Tap two or more events to select them. The Save button in the top right of the nav bar lights up once at least two are selected.
3. Tap Save. If the selected events share a single name, the merge runs immediately. If they have different names, Waypost shows a Name for the merged event bottom sheet listing each unique name — tap the one you want, and the merge runs with that name.

What happens during the merge: all photos from the selected events combine (duplicates removed), the date range expands to span from the earliest start to the latest end, and the source events are deleted. The merged event keeps the first-selected event's identity, type, and any "Change Event Location" override you'd already set; otherwise its location is re-derived from the combined photos' GPS so a merge of two trips at the same place lands on that place's pin.

Modern phones often take several near-identical shots in a row. Waypost can handle these three ways; you pick during onboarding (Card 15) and can change it anytime under Settings → Duplicate Photo Handling:

• Flag near-duplicates for review (recommended) — Waypost marks likely near-duplicates inside each event with a small badge and lets you walk through them, group by group, to decide which ones to hide.
• Tidy up automatically — Waypost hides near-duplicates from each event so a single representative shot shows. Originals stay in your Apple Photos library, untouched.
• Keep everything — show every photo, nothing hidden.

In all three options, nothing is ever deleted from your Apple Photo Library. "Hide" just means Waypost doesn't show it inside an event; the original is untouched.

If you picked Flag, the place to work through flagged duplicates is each event's detail screen. When an event has flagged near-duplicates, open it from the Timeline and you'll see a blue Review Dups button in the nav bar (with a count of the photo groups to review). Tap it to open the Review Duplicates screen, which steps you through each cluster of similar shots so you can pick which to keep visible. Once an event has nothing left flagged, the button disappears.

Adding a birthday, anniversary, or holiday in Settings automatically triggers a reprocess — there's no separate button to tap. As soon as you save the new entry, Waypost re-classifies every event with the updated information: events on that date get the new milestone name, and any tiny photo days with sufficient photos that didn't crystallize into events during the original scan get added back if they match the newly-saved date. You'll see an Updating your wayposts… spinner while it runs (usually a few seconds), then the Timeline reflects the new state.

Same applies to adding or editing a home location — saving a new home base triggers the same automatic reprocess so events near that location get re-classified as Home instead of Travel.

Waypost's Passport awards a stamp every time you've visited a country or a recognized city. (Earning stamps is free; opening the book to flip through them is a Premium feature.) The book is built from each event's location, so if a country you've visited doesn't appear — or its stamp shows up in the wrong place — the underlying event probably doesn't have a location set, usually because none of its photos carried GPS metadata. You can fix this directly:

1. Open the event from the Timeline tab.
2. Tap Edit Details in the nav bar, then choose Change Event Location.
3. Pick US or International, then enter the city + state (US) or city + country (International). The city field is optional — if you just want a state-level or country-level location, leave it blank.
4. Tap Save. Waypost looks up coordinates from your place name (city-level when it knows the city, otherwise state/country centroid) and pins the event there.

As soon as you save, Waypost reconciles the Passport for that event — its stamps drop from any old countries/cities and get re-awarded against the new location — and the pin moves on the Pin Map and Animated Travel globe. No restart needed. Your manual location override is preserved across future scans and merges, so Waypost won't overwrite it later.

City stamps only exist for a curated set of major cities with hand-illustrated landmarks; smaller towns earn the country stamp but not a separate city stamp.

If the replay button doesn't restart the animation, try this in order:

1. While you're on the Animated Travel tab, tap the Animated Travel tab icon again. Tapping the tab you're already on restarts the animation from the beginning (the same way Notes and Safari handle a re-tap).
2. If that doesn't help, close the Waypost app completely (swipe it up from the App Switcher), then reopen it.
3. Still stuck? Email us with your iPhone model and the iOS version you're running, and we'll take a look.

Some messaging apps truncate very long URLs. If your animation includes a lot of events, the link can grow past those limits. Try sharing via Mail or AirDrop instead, or reduce the number of events you include in the share before exporting.

The Create Apple Photo Album feature gathers photos into an album in your iOS Photos library where it's easy for you to find them when uploading to a photo print service (Shutterfly, Walgreens, Mpix, etc.). To create one:

1. Open an event from the Timeline.
2. Tap the Create Apple Photo Album tile in the premium row on Event Detail.
3. Tap the photos you want to include, then confirm.
4. Pick an existing Waypost album or create a new one — Waypost creates the matching album in your Apple Photos library the first time.
5. Open your preferred print service app or website and pick the album from your Apple Photos library to order prints.

Every album Waypost creates is automatically prefixed with Waypost: in your Apple Photos library, so you can find them quickly even with a large album collection. For example, naming your album "Hawaii Trip" in Waypost shows up as Waypost: Hawaii Trip in Apple Photos. If you rename or delete the album in Apple Photos, Waypost will still find it as long as the Waypost: prefix stays — strip the prefix and Waypost no longer recognizes it.

You can also long-press any single photo and choose Add to Apple Album to Print to add it one at a time without entering selection mode.

Both composers live on Event Detail. Open any event from the Timeline — you have two ways to reach them:

From the Premium row at the top of the event — tap the Send a Captioned Snap tile or the Send a Postcard tile. A blue banner appears below the nav bar (📸 or 📮) asking you to tap a photo in the event below. Tap any photo in the grid, and the composer opens with that photo loaded.

By long-pressing a photo — long-press any photo in the event grid. An action sheet appears with Send as captioned photo and Send as Postcard alongside other photo actions (favorite, add to album, remove). Pick one and the composer opens immediately with the long-pressed photo.

What each composer does:

• Captioned Snap — adds a handwritten caption to a single photo using one of six handwriting fonts. Position the caption anywhere on the image, then share via the iOS Share Sheet.
• Postcard — designs a digital postcard with the photo on the front and a handwritten message (also six font choices) on the back. Share the assembled card via text, Mail, or AirDrop.

Both composers are photo-only — videos can't be used in either. If you long-press a video and pick one of these options, Waypost shows a friendly "Captioned Snaps/Postcards are photo-only" message and the composer doesn't open.

If you use Waypost on more than one device signed into the same Apple ID — most commonly an iPhone and an iPad — Waypost keeps a single library in sync across them. The events you add, rename, re-date, re-locate, split, merge, or delete, along with your birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, home locations, and your favorite and duplicate-handling choices, all appear on each device.

It runs through your own iCloud, not through Waypost. Sync uses Apple's iCloud (CloudKit) under your existing Apple ID — the same trust model as backups. There are no Waypost servers and no account to create or sign into. Waypost never sees your data in transit, and nothing is shared with anyone else.

For sync to work, each device needs:

• The same Apple ID, with iCloud turned on.
• iCloud Photos turned on. Sync recognizes the same photo across devices by its iCloud identity, so a photo on your iPhone can be matched to the same photo on your iPad. Without iCloud Photos, the devices can't line photos up and sync stays paused (see "Sync isn't updating").

Sync runs while the app is open — each device catches up within a few seconds of being brought to the foreground, not while it's closed in the background. There's nothing to tap; it's automatic.

Your photos themselves are never copied between devices. Only the lightweight event information and your edits sync. Each device shows the matching photos from its own copy of your iCloud photo library.

Yes. Waypost runs on iPad with a full-screen iPad layout, and on iPad it works the same as on iPhone. As long as both devices are signed into the same Apple ID with iCloud and iCloud Photos on, they share one library — organize on whichever device is handy and your timeline, names, and edits follow you to the other. See "Setting up a second device" for the first-run steps on the new device.

When you install Waypost on a second device signed into the same Apple ID, it detects your existing library and shows a Welcome Back screen instead of starting a brand-new setup — so the second device never quietly builds its own separate, conflicting library.

On that screen:

• Tap "Set up from a recent save or another device" (recommended) to bring your existing library onto this device and keep it in sync going forward.
• Or tap "Start over without prior progress or device syncing" if you'd rather this device keep its own independent library — see "Keeping a device's library separate" below.

Either way, your iCloud backups stay safe. Choosing to set up from a recent save brings you to a picker where you can choose which library and save to restore from.

If you'd rather a device keep its own independent Waypost library — its own events and names, not shared with your other devices — choose "Start over without prior progress or device syncing" on the Welcome Back screen.

A separate device won't sync changes to or from your other devices, and its backups are kept in their own space so it can never overwrite or delete the backups your synced devices share. You can still reinstall and restore that separate library later — its saves are listed under its own source in the restore picker.

Open Settings → Restore from Backup on each device to see its sync status:

• "Sync across devices: On" — this device is syncing normally.
• "Sync across devices: Preparing…" — Waypost is still matching your photos to their iCloud identities (this happens right after install, or while iCloud Photos is still downloading your library). Sync holds off until enough of your photos are ready, then turns on by itself. This is normal; just give iCloud Photos time to finish. Make sure iCloud Photos is turned on under iOS Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Photos.
• "Separate library" — this device was set up to stay independent and won't sync (see above).

If both devices show On but a change isn't appearing yet:

1. Open Waypost on both devices and leave it in the foreground for a few seconds — sync only runs while the app is open, and iCloud needs a moment to carry the change across.
2. Confirm both devices use the same Apple ID with iCloud and iCloud Photos turned on.
3. Still not catching up after a minute or two? Email us with both devices' iOS versions and what you changed, and we'll take a look.

Whether a device syncs with your others or keeps a separate library is decided when you first set it up, and the current mode is shown read-only under Settings → Restore from Backup. To change it, delete and reinstall Waypost on that device, then pick the other option during the Welcome Back / restore flow.

There's intentionally no in-app on/off toggle: flipping a device that built its own separate library over to "synced" would merge two independently-built libraries and create duplicate events across all your devices. Reinstalling and restoring keeps the result clean.

Waypost saves a rolling set of auto-backups as you use the app — the latest snapshot, plus the last 5 days, last 3 weeks, and last 3 months. They're listed in Settings → Auto-Backups, and you can tap any snapshot to roll back to that state.

Each backup is mirrored to Waypost's private iCloud Drive container on the same Apple ID you use on your iPhone. This means:

• If you delete and reinstall Waypost, the app will automatically restore your most recent backup on first launch — you won't lose your events.
• If you get a new iPhone signed into the same iCloud account, install Waypost there and it will pick up your backups.
• If you keep using more than one device on the same Apple ID, Waypost also keeps them in sync going forward — see Sync & multiple devices.

If you see a yellow "Local only — won't survive uninstall" banner in Settings, iCloud Drive isn't enabled for Waypost. Open the iOS Settings app → tap your name → iCloud → iCloud Drive, and make sure Waypost is turned on. The next backup (within a few minutes of using the app) will sync.

For a full manual backup file you can save anywhere, use Settings → Export Backup. To bring one in from an older install, use Import Backup. (Note: Import wholesale-replaces your current Waypost data — export first if you want to keep what you have.)

Each main screen with a tutorial has a small ? icon at the top — Timeline, Pin Map, Animated Travel, and Event Detail. Tap it anytime to replay that screen's walkthrough. The first time you reach each screen, Waypost asks if you'd like a quick tour; saying "No, thanks" hides the prompt but the ? icon stays available for whenever you want it.

Delete the Waypost app from your iPhone. That removes everything Waypost stored locally — the information you entered (states, birthdays, anniversaries), the events Waypost detected, and the edits you made inside the app. Your photos and videos in the iOS Photo Library are not affected — Waypost only reads from the library, it never owns those files. Apple favorites you set from inside Waypost also stay (favorites live on the photo itself, not in Waypost).

If you also want to remove your iCloud backups so a reinstall wouldn't restore them: open the iOS Settings app → tap your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Waypost → Delete from iCloud. After that, deleting the app will leave nothing behind.

If you have an active Waypost Premium subscription, deleting the app does not cancel it. Cancel via iOS Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Waypost Premium → Cancel Subscription. Lifetime unlock buyers don't need to cancel anything — there's no recurring charge.