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A picture becomes a dated journal entry

Partly live · Nothing looks at a photo you attach HERE, as a journal entry — it is stored and displayed and that is all. The diagnosing half of the app is a different screen: a photo taken on the Ask screen, or sent into the chat, does get read and answered. This page is about the record-keeping one. And a photo whose phone copy has been cleared to save space needs a network connection to display; the recent ones stay on the phone and work offline.

Tap Photo on any plant and the picture becomes a journal entry with the date on it. It saves to your phone first, so it works standing in a bed with no signal, and uploads whenever a connection turns up. Photos of the same plant line up oldest to newest, with the plant's age under each one.

What taking a photo actually does

It writes a journal entry. That is the whole idea, and it is why the camera sits next to Watered and Fed rather than in a gallery somewhere.

Nobody types "lower leaves yellowing, brown spots at the margin, worse on the shaded side." They take a picture in two seconds. So the picture is treated as the entry rather than as something clipped to one, and it shows up in the plant's timeline on the day it was taken.

The order things happen in

Four steps, and only the last one needs a network.

  1. Shrink. A modern phone hands over three to eight megabytes per shot. That is more resolution than a photograph of a leaf needs, it fills a phone in a season, and it does not upload over one bar. Every photo is reduced to 1600 pixels on its long edge first.
  2. Save to the phone. Before anything else. From this moment the photo is recorded and visible.
  3. Show it. In the timeline, and in the strip at the bottom of the plant's page.
  4. Upload, whenever. On its own, in the background, retrying when a connection turns up.

You are never waiting on step four, and you are never asked to retry it.

The strip, and why it runs backwards from the timeline

Under the journal there is a row called How it has looked. It holds every photo of that plant, oldest first, with the plant's age under each one — day 3, day 7, day 16.

The timeline runs newest-first because you usually want to know what happened lately. The strip runs the other way on purpose, because it is not a list of recent events. It is a growth record, and a growth record read backwards is a pile of pictures.

If any photo predates the day you recorded the plant going in — which happens, people photograph a seed packet or fix the date later — the whole strip shows dates instead of ages, so it never mixes the two.

A check that finds something ends in a camera

Garden Mode asks you to look at things: any pests on the leaves, anything on the undersides. Answering Found something used to log a note and move on, which threw away the only genuinely useful thing about that moment.

Now the finding is recorded, and then the next screen asks for a picture. The finding is saved either way — you can say Not now and it stays recorded. But if you do take one, it joins that entry rather than making a second one.

Who can see them

Only you.

Photos are not stored at a public address, and there is no link that can be handed to anybody. Every view is a request that checks the picture belongs to your account first, and a request from a different account gets exactly the same answer as a request for a photo that was never taken. That symmetry is deliberate: telling somebody "that exists but is not yours" is itself a small leak.

How many you can keep

Fifty photos on a garden, and deleting one gives the room straight back.

It counts photos rather than megabytes, because the app already shrinks every picture as it saves it — so a photo is a photo, and nobody should have to think in file sizes to use a garden app.

The camera tells you before you take one you cannot keep, not after. That matters more than it sounds: the alternative is a picture that looks saved on your phone, quietly never arrives, and is missing the day you go looking for it on a different device. So the button says what is going on and what to do about it, and it is still a button — not a grayed-out thing with no explanation.

Delete a few and it opens again immediately. There is no waiting and nothing to clear out separately. A limit you cannot get out from under by tidying up is a trap rather than a budget.

The limit is there to catch something going wrong, not to sell you anything. Fifty is far more than most gardens take in a season, and if you ever meet it the honest reading is that something is filling up your garden by mistake — not that you have outgrown anything. There is nothing to upgrade to; the beta is free.

What is not built

Nothing looks at the photo. No identification, no diagnosis, no "what is wrong with this plant". It is planned, it is a large piece of work, and it is not here. What shipped is capture, storage and display — which had to come first, because a diagnosis needs a photograph somebody actually took.

An offline gap, at the edges. Recent photos are on your phone and display with no signal. Once a photo has been backed up and your phone is short of room, the phone copy is cleared and that picture then needs a connection to display. In practice this affects old photos on a heavily used device; the ones you are looking at are the ones that are still local.

One photo per entry. Take three pictures of the same problem and you get three entries. Grouping them is a small change and we have not made it.

No editing. No cropping, no rotating, no captions written after the fact. The date is recorded and the picture is the picture.

Common questions

I sent a photo of something that is not in my garden. Where did it go?
**Profile → Photos with no plant, as of 23 August 2026.** Before that date it went nowhere you could find. Every other list of photos in the app starts from a plant — the strip on a plant’s page is *its* pictures. The one exception was the row of recent shots on the Ask screen, and that row stops at twelve. So a picture we could not match to anything you grow was **there for twelve photos and then gone**. The file itself was never deleted; there was simply nothing left pointing at it. **The new screen leads with what each one turned out to be** — *Sunflower*, *Tomato · Cherokee Purple — Early blight* — rather than a wall of thumbnails with dates. Your phone already has the wall of thumbnails and is better at it. What it cannot tell you is what the picture was of. **A picture we never worked out says so**, in those words, instead of being quietly left out. **And you can put one on a plant later.** Tap *Put it on a plant*, pick it, and the photo becomes a proper journal entry on that plant — dated the day you took the picture, not the day you filed it — so it shows in the plant’s own run of photos and follows you to another phone.
Does the app remember what a photo was of?
**Yes, from 23 August 2026, and only when the app actually told you at the time.** When you send a picture and the answer names the plant — or the pest, or the disease — that name is kept on the photo. It is what the *Photos with no plant* screen reads. **It is careful about which picture.** Send three photos in one message and a reading about the second one is written on the second one, not on all three. If the answer did not say which, only the first is labeled. A caption on the wrong picture is worse than none. **Nothing is guessed and nothing new is asked of the model.** This is the answer you already got, written down next to the picture it was about — free at the moment it is given, and expensive to work out again later. **Photos taken before that date are captioned too**, wherever the conversation they came from is still on your phone or in your account.
I attached a photo to a question and then removed it. Did it still go up to my account?
**Until 13 August 2026 it did, and that was a bug rather than a decision.** The reason it happened is also the reason the app feels quick, so it is worth explaining. **A photo is saved to your phone the instant you attach it**, before you have typed a word — so that closing the app halfway through a question, or walking out of signal, never loses the picture. That part is right and is staying. What was wrong is that pressing the ✕ on the thumbnail only took it off the screen. **The picture stayed on the phone, still queued**, and the next time you had signal it went up. You had taken it back and it was sent anyway. **Removing it now removes it** — off the screen and off the device, in one tap. **One thing it deliberately will not delete:** a photo that has already become a journal entry on a plant. That one belongs to your record rather than to the question box, and the place to remove it is the plant's own page. **And if you attached a photo and simply walked away** — closed the app, switched screens, never sent and never removed — that was the same gap by a different route, and the commoner one. It is closed as of the same day. The app now clears those on opening, and it is careful about which ones, because the wrong version of this deletes a picture somebody was still using. **It only takes a photo that is more than a day old, is not part of any journal entry, and is not attached to any question — including a question still waiting to send.** Anything in progress is left exactly where it is. **It also writes down what it removed**, so if a picture ever goes missing we can tell you what happened to it instead of guessing.
I signed in on a new phone. Will my photos and the answers about them come back?
**Yes, from 12 August 2026 — and before that date they did not, which was our bug rather than anything you did.** Your photos were never lost: the moment one uploads it is held on our side, and a photo you take is on your phone straight away. What was missing was the part that tells a NEW device those photos exist. Sign in on a second phone and the app knew about the plant, the journal entry, even that a photo was attached — and had no way to ask for the picture. **Now it does**, and the answers we gave you about them come back too, which is the half that used to vanish completely. **They arrive as you look at them, not all at once.** Opening a plant fetches the pictures on that screen rather than pulling a season of photos down the moment you sign in, because that is somebody's phone plan. So on a slow connection a photo may take a second to appear the first time you scroll past it, and after that it is on the device.
Where is the Photo button?
On any plant's page, in the row of one-tap entries alongside Watered, Fed, Harvested and Pest. It also appears on its own in Garden Mode the moment a check finds something — answer 'Found something' to a pest check and the next screen asks for a picture, because that is the two seconds when the plant is in front of you.
Does it use the camera or my photo library?
Both. Tapping Photo opens your phone's own sheet, which offers the camera first and your library underneath. We deliberately did not force it straight to the camera: it saves one tap and it removes the case where somebody photographs a sick leaf in the garden and then sits down at the kitchen table to deal with it.
Will it work with no signal?
Yes, and this is the part built most carefully. The photo is shrunk and saved to your phone before anything touches the network, so it is recorded, visible and attached to the plant whether or not you have a bar. The upload happens later on its own. You never wait for it and you are never told to try again.
Why does it say 'not backed up yet'?
Because it is honest. A photo lives on your phone until it reaches our servers, and until then your phone is the only copy. If you are signed out there is no account to back up to, so it stays local indefinitely — that is a supported way to use GardenTrack, but a phone that gets wiped takes the photos with it. Signing in gives them somewhere else to be.
How much of my phone's storage will this use?
Each photo is shrunk to about 300 KB before it is stored — phones produce files ten times that. GardenTrack holds up to roughly 48 MB of photos on the device, which is around 160 pictures. Past that it clears the oldest ones that are already backed up. Nothing that has not been backed up is ever cleared, because that would be deleting the only copy.
Can other people see my photos?
No. Photos are not on a public address. Every single view goes through a check that the photo belongs to your account, and a request from anybody else gets the same 'not found' it would get for a photo that does not exist. There is no shareable link, and no way to browse the storage.
Can I delete one?
Yes. Tap the photo to open it full screen and there is a delete option underneath. It removes the picture from your phone and from our servers, and the journal entry it was attached to stays, without the picture.
Does GardenTrack look at the photo and tell me what is wrong?
Yes — on the Ask screen. Take a photo there and it goes, with that plant's own journal and its sourced crop record, to an AI that answers in plain words: what it can see, how sure it is, and what it would ask you next when it is not sure. [Asking about a photo](/help/asking-about-a-photo/) is the page for it. **This answer said not yet for longer than it was true** — a photo attached to a journal entry is still just stored and displayed, and that is what this page is about, but the diagnosing half shipped and we left the old sentence standing. Corrected 11 August 2026.
What happens to the picture I take when a pest check finds something?
It attaches to that finding — the same journal entry, not a second one. Answering 'Found something' records the finding right away, before you are asked for the picture, so getting distracted between the two taps cannot lose it.

More on this

Shipped 2026-07-31. Last checked 2026-08-25. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.