Support
Support
Most questions about Filters are about the same four things: what the first index does, where your photos go (nowhere), how iCloud fits in, and what you get without paying. All four are below.
Common questions
How does Filters know what colour a photo is?
It reads your library once and measures how much of each frame every hue actually owns — not the average colour, the share of the frame. The result is a small index of numbers: dominant hue, second hue, share percentages, a busyness score, and any subjects it recognised. That index is what your queries search, which is why results come back instantly instead of re-scanning thousands of photos every time.
How long does the first index take?
It depends on the size of your library and how busy your device is. Filters works through it in the background and picks up where it left off if you close the app, so you can start querying the part it has already covered. After the first pass only new photos need analysing, which happens in seconds.
Does anything leave my phone?
No. Every stage — colour measurement, busyness, subject recognition — runs on-device using Apple frameworks. There is no account, no upload, no server that sees your photos, and no analytics on what is in them. The index is a local cache; delete the app and it goes with it.
Does it work with iCloud Photos?
Yes. Filters reads your library through Photos, so an iCloud library behaves like any other. If your device is set to Optimise Storage, Filters asks Photos for what it needs and analyses what comes back — so a library that lives mostly in iCloud still indexes, it just needs a connection while it works through the backlog.
What is the difference between free and Pro?
Free searches the last twelve months of your library, with every filter available — colour, busyness, subjects, favourites, dates, and the full three-way Venn query. Pro opens the same tools across your entire library, however far back it goes. Pro is $19.99 once for lifetime access, or $9.99 a year.
How accurate is subject detection?
Subjects use Apple's on-device Vision framework, and it is good rather than infallible — a dog at the far edge of a wide shot may be missed, and a fox may read as a dog. Treat subjects as a way to narrow a colour query rather than as a strict inventory of your library. Colour dominance and busyness are measured directly from pixels and do not have this caveat.
Does Filters change or delete my photos?
Never. Filters reads your library and writes nothing back to it. Marking a photo as a favourite happens in Photos itself; Filters only reads that flag so you can filter on it.
Which devices does it run on?
iPhone, iPad, and Mac — one purchase covers all three.
Still stuck?
Email is the fastest route, and it reaches the person who wrote the app. To get a useful answer first time, say which device and iOS version you are on, roughly how large your library is, and what you expected to happen versus what did.
One person answers these, usually within a day or two.
Reporting a bad result
If a photo lands in the wrong colour — an obviously blue frame reading as teal, say — that is worth telling us about. Include the reading Filters gave it (the detail view shows both colours and their percentages) and what you would have expected. Please do not send the photo itself unless you want to; the numbers are usually enough, and we would rather not have your pictures.
- Device and iOS version
- Rough library size, and whether it is an iCloud library
- The query you ran and the result you got
- What you expected instead
Your library is already sorted by colour. It just can’t say so yet.
Filters is finishing up for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Free covers the last twelve months of your photos; Pro opens the rest for $19.99 once or $9.99 a year.
