Support
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The first time you open it, OldLight looks through your photo library for faces. It starts with your selfies (the front-camera photos iOS already groups together), then looks for the same person in the rest of your photos. It guesses that you are the person who turns up most in your selfies. Every face is compared on the phone; nothing is uploaded and no one else sees a thing.
The video is not every photo of you. For each stretch of time — a week or a month, depending on how many photos you have — it keeps the one clearest, most front-facing photo and lets the rest go. That is what gives the video an even pace instead of a burst from one holiday and nothing for a year.
Photos that are blurry, tiny, turned away from the camera, or where another face dominates are skipped. So are the videos and images OldLight itself saved to your library.
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If your Photos settings use Optimize iPhone Storage, the originals live in iCloud and only small copies are on the phone. OldLight shows what is on the phone first, so the earliest pictures can look soft, and fetches the originals when it needs them — for the scan, the video and the average face. That needs an internet connection, and on cellular iOS may hold the download back depending on your Photos settings. A photo that cannot be fetched within about 45 seconds is left out of that video and tried again next time.
A large library takes a few minutes to scan the first time. You can leave the app; it carries on where it stopped when you come back.
Open the ⋯ menu and choose Who's in the video. There you can point OldLight at the right person, and tell it which faces are and aren't you. On the home screen, Some of these aren't you? lets you tap away anyone who slipped in — similar photos of them go too, and the best other photo of you from that time takes the place.
If you have made a mess of it, Start over with OldLight's own guess at the bottom of that screen forgets every mark and begins again.
Three places to look:
Read access, to find your face. Write access, to save the finished video and picture to Photos. If you gave limited access, OldLight only sees the photos you picked; a Choose more photos link appears on the home screen. For the full story of your face you want full access: Settings → Apps → OldLight → Photos. Your photos never leave the phone either way — see the privacy policy.
Watching is free: the whole video and the average face, in a small preview with a watermark. OldLight Full is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. It unlocks saving and sharing the video in 1080p without the watermark, the full-size average face, and everything OldLight adds later.
Purchases are tied to your Apple Account. Tap Restore purchase on the purchase screen. If you use a different Apple Account on this phone than the one you bought with, sign in with that one first. If the purchase was made with Ask to Buy and is still waiting for approval, the app unlocks on its own once it is approved.
That is deliberate. The free preview is for watching in the app; while the screen is being recorded or mirrored it shows a shutter instead. OldLight Full saves a proper 1080p file you can share anywhere.
OldLight's index of faces is not included in your backup — it is the one piece of data we think should never leave the phone it was made on. On a new phone OldLight scans your library again, which takes a few minutes. Your marks (that's me, not me, hidden photos) come across with the backup, and your purchase follows your Apple Account.
Into Photos, under Recents and Videos. The average face is saved there as a picture. They are ordinary files: yours to keep, share, edit or delete.
On the finished video, tap Style. You can set how many photos pass per second, show or hide the month and year in the corner, and switch Afterglow — each photo lingering faintly under the next — on or off. The video is silent on purpose, so you can lay any music you like over it in your editor or when you post it.
The video is 1080 × 1920 (portrait), H.264, MP4. The average face is a 1080 × 1350 JPEG. Both are made entirely on the phone.
Delete the app. Its index of faces and your marks go with it, and there is no copy anywhere else — OldLight has no server and no account. Videos and pictures you saved stay in Photos until you delete them there.
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A person reads this mailbox. Say which iPhone and iOS version you have, and what you expected to happen — a screenshot helps if something looks wrong.
Bug reports, translation mistakes and ideas are all welcome. We usually reply within a couple of days.