A picture becomes a dated journal entry
Partly live · A photo you attach HERE, as a journal entry, is stored and displayed. The one look the app takes at it is the one you ask for: on the plant's page you can pick two photos and ask what changed between them, and the answer says what is different, never what is wrong. The diagnosing half of the app is a different screen: a photo taken on the Talk 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 Take a photo on any plant, or the link beside it to pick one you already have, 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 history on the day it was taken.
The order things happen in
Four steps, and only the last one needs a network.
- 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.
- Save to the phone. Before anything else. From this moment the photo is recorded and visible.
- Show it. In the plant's history, and in the strip at the bottom of the plant's page.
- 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 history
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.
From 2 September 2026, a photo filed under a plant also carries how tall the plant looked in it — day 12 · ~5 in — judged by the same look that writes down what it can see. It is a reading, not a fact: it does not change the height on the plant's own card, and when nothing in the picture gives a sense of scale, nothing is written rather than a guess. Rafe can read those numbers back, so "how tall was it in September?" is answered from what was noted at the time, without looking at the photo again.
The history 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 free 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.
On the beta and the paid plan the ceiling is 5,000, and it is there to catch something going wrong, not to sell you anything. That is far more than any garden takes in a season, so if you ever meet it the honest reading is that something is filling up your garden by mistake — not that you have outgrown anything.
When the plant is not in your garden yet
Sometimes Rafe can tell what a photo shows but cannot find that plant in your garden. The card says so first — "It looks like cucumber, which is not in your garden yet" — and gives you two ways on. Add a plant like this opens the add-a-plant form with the kind already filled in; you confirm the kind and the bed, and nothing is saved until you do. Or, if Rafe is wrong about what it is, pick the plant it really is from the chips underneath and the photo goes on that plant's page.
Let Rafe guess, for the whole pile
Open Photos with no plant and tap Let Rafe guess. Nothing is sent anywhere: for each picture Rafe already read when it was taken, the app checks that reading against your garden, on your phone. When exactly one of your plants is that kind, it says "Looks like your Sungold" with a Put it there button; when two could be, it lists them by name and bed and you pick; when you have no plant of that kind, it says so and offers the add form with the kind filled in, and nothing is saved until you confirm. Put them all there first shows you the list — which picture goes to which plant — and files them when you confirm; afterwards one tap, Undo — put them back, reverses the whole batch. The ones with a choice, or with no match, wait for you. A picture Rafe never read stays as it was.
When Rafe says he kept a photo with a plant
When you send a picture and Rafe answers "Kept with Bush bean — it looked like the one you have", the picture is on that plant's page from that moment, with a journal line carrying Rafe's reading, and it leaves Photos with no plant. Until 3 September it did not: the chat said kept, and the same picture stayed in the unplaced pile on your phone. Not that plant? under the receipt puts it back.
What is not built
Nothing tells two plants of the same kind apart by sight. A few things do look at your photos — a garden walk's report, a photo you send Rafe, and Compare two photos on a plant's page — and Rafe can name the crop in a photo you send him. But if you grow two tomatoes, nothing guesses which one a picture shows. That is yours to say.
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 photos from earlier in the season 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.
A photo that is not of a plant
Since 3 September 2026 Rafe says what every photo shows, and a picture of nothing growing comes back as not a picture of a plant. The chat and the photo library say exactly that, offer nothing to add, and still let you put it on one of your plants if it belongs there — a label, a tag, a seed tray. For a few hours that morning the app treated the words “not a plant” as a crop name and offered to add it to your garden; that is fixed, and the same rule now runs on the phone and on the server from one shared word.
Common questions
- I photographed a plant on a Walk. Does it attach to that plant?
Yes, from 17 September 2026 — and before that date a walk photo could leave two things missing.
Name a plant as the stop and the picture was always filed straight to it. Stop at a growing space instead — a pot, a bed — and if that space holds exactly one plant, the picture now files to it too, the moment you take it: a pot with one orange IS the orange. A space with several plants still files the picture to the space itself, never guessed onto one of them. Either way it becomes that plant's, or that space's, most recent photo.
From 14 October 2026 a Walk makes this simple: one stop for each plant or tree. Each picture files to the plant you are standing at. A space with more than one plant also gets one extra stop, for the whole space, at the end of its plants. That picture files to the space, for your journal, and never replaces the plants' own. A space with one plant is just that one stop. A space with none is a single stop for the space. Each plant stop lines up with last week's picture of that same plant. A plant that is the only one in its space also finds last week's picture of the whole space, since that is how a one-plant pot was photographed before.
And it now writes one line in the journal, dated when you took it — a walk photo did not before, whichever kind of stop it was.
The same rule runs wherever a photograph arrives with nobody typing which plant: sorting a pile of new photos into plants, and attaching a growing space — not just a plant — from the chat's own picker.
- My plant's page now opens on a photo. Which one is it?
Your own latest look at that plant, dated — from 8 September 2026. It is the best shot from the most recent day you photographed it, chosen the same way the journal picks its pictures, and it sits under the plant's name the way the journal's memory card sits under its title. Tap it to see it full size. A plant you have not photographed shows no card, only the Take a photo button.
- Rafe could not tell which plant my photo was of. What does he do now?
From 3 September 2026, he says what he decided, and asks by name when he has to. If the picture matches exactly one of your plants, it is kept there and a line under the answer says so, with a way to change it. If two or more of your plants fit — two tomatoes in different beds, say — the card lists them by name and bed and you tap the one it is. If the picture looks like a plant you do not have, Rafe says so and offers to add it; if it is not a plant at all, the photo is simply kept with your unplaced photos and nothing is invented. Rafe never tries to tell two plants of the same kind apart by sight — that is yours to say.
- I sent Rafe a photo in the chat — does it get kept on the plant?
From 3 September 2026, yes. A photo you send with a question is kept on the plant you attached, the plant you named, or the plant whose page you asked from — and the app can undo that with one tap under the answer. Between the end of August and 3 September the server only did this on a reply path the app does not use, so photos sent through the chat in that time went to the unplaced pile; they stay there until you place them from Profile → Photos with no plant.
- Is there a faster way to photograph a plant than opening it first?
Yes, from 2 September 2026. On the Garden tab, every plant in a bed now has a small orange camera at the end of its row. Tap it and the camera opens straight away.
The photo is filed to that plant on its own — dated the day you took it, on that plant’s page, in its history. You are not asked which plant it was, because you told us by tapping that row.
⚠ This is why it exists, and it is not a small thing. Nearly nine in ten photos in the app had no plant attached to them. The reason was the route: keeping the plant meant opening the plant, scrolling, and then tapping the camera — three taps and a screen and a half. Forgetting it took two taps and was always in front of you. The easy path lost the plant every time, so we put the camera where the plants already are.
The big purple Walk your garden button at the top is still the way to photograph several plants in one go. This is for one plant, right now.
- I matched a photo to a plant after the fact. Will what the app already said about it show up there?
Yes, from 1 September 2026 — and both halves of that were broken until today.
When you send a photo the app writes down what it can see, and often a full answer about what might be wrong. If the photo is not matched to a plant yet, those have nowhere to go.
Matching the photo now brings both across — the notes AND the answer — onto that plant’s page, dated when you took the picture.
⚠ What was wrong: matching a photo through the chat brought the notes across, but matching one from your Photos screen — which is where we actually ask you to — brought nothing. And neither ever brought the answer, only the notes.
The card that asks you to match unplaced photos also counts more now. It used to offer only pictures with notes waiting. A picture with a full answer and no notes was never mentioned to anybody, which is exactly the kind you would most want back.
- Rafe said I took a photo the day after I actually did. Why?
Because it was reading a clock in the wrong place, and only in the evening. Fixed 8 September 2026.
Our servers keep time in UTC. If you photographed a plant at 8pm on a Tuesday in California, that same moment is already Wednesday morning in UTC — so when Rafe said the date back to you, he said Wednesday.
It only ever went wrong in the evening, which is when a lot of people are out in the garden. Earlier in the day the two clocks agree and nothing looked odd.
Now every date Rafe says is worked out on your calendar, in your own time zone. The same fix went to the date a plant finished — pull something out on Tuesday evening and it says Tuesday. Nothing you recorded was changed; only what we say back to you was wrong.
- I took a photo days ago and sent it today. Which date does my plant show?
The day you took it, from 1 September 2026.
Until then the app filed a picture under the moment you picked it. Take a photo on Sunday, send it on Wednesday, and your plant history said Wednesday. ⚠ That matters more here than in an ordinary photo app — the dates are what growth comparisons and the season chart are built on, so a picture filed three days late quietly moves your plant’s story.
Now it reads the date from the picture itself when there is one.
Two dates it will not accept. Anything in the future, because a phone with its clock set wrong would otherwise drag everything that reads it. And anything from before this app existed, because that is what a damaged file looks like. In both cases it falls back to now, which is what it always did.
⚠ One honest limit: a photo that has been edited, re-saved, or sent to you through a messaging app carries the later date, not the original. We use the best date the file gives us, and it is not always the day you pressed the shutter.
- I sent the same photo twice. Do I have it twice?
Not since 1 September 2026 — it keeps the one you sent first.
A second tap, or picking the same file again days later, used to store a whole separate picture. In one garden ten of sixty-five pictures were copies of something already there, one of them five times over. Nobody did anything wrong; the app simply never compared them.
Now it recognizes a file it already has, and keeps the original along with its original date. ⚠ The date matters: the second send is not a newer photograph, and moving it would slide that picture forward in your plant’s history for no reason.
A genuinely different photo is always its own picture — even of the same plant a minute later, which is exactly what growth comparisons are made of.
Nothing you sent is lost. If you had duplicates before today they are still there; this stops new ones.
- My profile says you spotted something in some of my pictures. What does that mean?
It means the app looked at those photos, wrote down what it could see, and does not know which plant they are of.
When a picture arrives the app notes what it can see — how far along the plant looks, how healthy it seems. ⚠ It does that before it knows whose plant it is. If the photo never gets matched to a plant, those notes have nowhere to go: no plant page can show them.
From 1 September 2026, telling us which plant a picture is of brings its notes with it. They appear on that plant’s page, dated the day you took the photo. Nothing has to be looked at a second time.
The card only says this when it is true. Most pictures with no plant have nothing waiting in them, and then it goes back to the quiet version — they are kept, and there is no hurry. We would rather say nothing than invent a reason to chase you.
- 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 Talk 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. It uploads to your account when there is a connection, and the label goes once it has. A phone that gets wiped before then takes the photo with it.
- 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.
- Can it tell me what changed between two photos of a plant?
Yes, from 7 September 2026 — on the plant's page, and only when you ask. Under How it has looked, tap Compare two photos, pick an older one and a newer one, and Rafe says what is visibly different in plain words: taller, more leaves, flowers open, fruit set, damage. He only counts something as a change if he can see it in both pictures — a thing that is simply out of frame in one is not a change.
He never says what is wrong. That is the Talk screen's job, and a comparison that started to name a cause is dropped rather than shown. When the two cannot honestly be compared — different framing, one too dark, a close-up of a different part — he says I can't tell from these two, and that is a complete answer, not a failure.
Each comparison uses one of your photo questions, so it never runs on its own. Only photos that have backed up can be compared, because they are read from your account. Nothing is kept unless you tap Keep as a note, which writes it into the plant's journal as a plain note.
- Does GardenTrack look at the photo and tell me what is wrong?
Yes — on the Talk 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 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.
Shipped 2026-07-31. Last checked 2026-10-14. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.