Questions about
your photo story?

Limited Access only lets the app see a selection of photos you choose — which means your totals would be incomplete. If you have 22,000 photos and grant access to 50, the app can only calculate 50.

Full Access is needed to accurately calculate your total storage, all years, and your real biggest day. Without it, the numbers won’t reflect your actual library.

Yes — for most libraries the calculation takes 5–15 seconds. Larger libraries (50,000+ photos) may take up to 30 seconds. The app reads every asset’s metadata, which takes time proportional to your library size.

The wait is intentional. Each card you see while waiting is showing you real insights being discovered as the calculation runs. Let it finish — the final results card is worth it.

Sling Photos Reveal is designed for iPhone. It may run on iPad but the layout is optimised for a phone screen. For the best experience, use it on your iPhone — which also has your real photo library rather than a shared iCloud library.

This is the most common question — and there’s a specific reason for it.

If you have iCloud Photos turned on with “Optimise iPhone Storage”, Apple stores the full-resolution files in iCloud and keeps smaller proxy thumbnails on your device. When the app reads file sizes, it reads what’s locally available — which may be the thumbnail, not the original.

iCloud shows your total cloud storage, which includes originals. The app calculates from your device, which may include some compressed proxies. For photos and short videos the difference is small. For long 4K videos, the gap can be significant.

If your numbers look lower than expected, this is why — not a bug. The app labels estimated values where it detects this situation.

The bar chart on the results card is sized by gigabytes, not photo count. The highlighted peak year is the year with the most storage — which isn’t always the year with the most photos.

A year where you shot a lot of 4K video — even just a few clips — can have more storage than a year with thousands of photos. Video files are typically 10–30× larger than photos.

For example: 2023 might have 3,000 photos but 2021 might have 1,200 photos and 90 minutes of 4K video. 2021 uses more storage, so the bar is longer and it’s highlighted as your peak year — even though 2023 had more shots.

The app finds the oldest creation date in your library. If you’ve ever imported photos from an old camera, a film scan, or a family member’s device, those files carry their original creation date — which may go back much further than your iPhone years.

A photo taken on a digital camera in 2005 and imported to your iPhone in 2018 will appear as your oldest photo with a 2005 date. This is correct — that date is genuinely the earliest moment your library contains.

This almost always happens when photos were imported from different sources — an old phone, a digital camera, or scanned prints. The gap appears between the last imported-old-photo and the first native iPhone photo.

The app caps gaps at 365 days to reduce artefacts like this, but if you have imports from very different eras the gap may still appear larger than it really was. It’s not a bug — it’s your library’s true timeline, just possibly not the story you were expecting.

The location card uses GPS coordinates from your photos, grouped into clusters. A few things can cause unexpected results:

Many photos without location data: If a large portion of your library was taken with Location Services off, the most photographed location may reflect a smaller slice of your actual history.

Photos imported from other devices: Imported photos carry their original GPS data. If someone sent you hundreds of photos from a specific city, those count too.

Workplace or commute: Some people are surprised to find their most photographed location is their office, gym, or a school — because they visit those places hundreds of times a year.

The location card requires that your photos have GPS data. If you’ve had Location Services off for Camera, or if a significant portion of your library was imported without location data, the card won’t have enough data to show a meaningful result.

To enable location on future photos: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Camera → While Using the App.

Photos you’ve already taken without location data cannot be updated retroactively.

Tap the share button at the top of any card. The app sends two items: a PNG image of your results card and a text message with your total and a link to download the app.

Most messaging apps receive these as separate items — the image appears as a photo, the link appears as a preview card below it. This is normal and works well across iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat, and email.

Yes — when the iOS share sheet appears, you can remove the text item before sending. Press and hold the text bubble in the share sheet to deselect it, then send the image only.

Alternatively, take a screenshot of the results card directly — it’s designed to look great as a screenshot.

The share card is a specially designed version of your results — optimised as a portrait image for messaging and social media. It includes your profile photo (from your contacts), your total count, key stats, and the year-by-year bar chart.

The in-app results card is interactive and scrollable. The share image is a static snapshot — it’s designed to look great at the size it appears in a message thread.

The share card pulls your name and photo from your own contact card in Contacts. If your personal contact doesn’t have a photo set, or if the app doesn’t have Contacts access, the header will show a placeholder.

To set your own contact photo: open Contacts → tap your name at the top → Edit → tap the photo area to add one.

No. The app has no way to transmit your data — there’s no API endpoint, no cloud service, and no analytics connected. Your 22,000 photos and their file sizes stay entirely on your device.

If you choose to share your results using the share button, you control where it goes. Ohh Wow Labs never sees it.

Deleting the app removes it and all its data from your device. Because no data was ever stored externally, there is nothing to delete on a server. Your photos are completely unaffected — the app never touched them, only read their metadata.

Only for the map on the location card — which uses Apple Maps to display the map tile for your most photographed location. The map does not send your photo data anywhere; it’s the same as opening Apple Maps to a specific coordinate.

Everything else — all calculations, all insights, all 10 cards — works completely offline.

Sling Photos works with any drive that supports SMB file sharing — which includes most USB drives connected to a Mac, most NAS devices (Synology, QNAP, Western Digital, Seagate), and router-attached USB storage.

For setup guides and compatibility: slingphotos.com/support