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All of Cherish's data lives in two places on your Mac:

• App data & scan results: ~/Library/Application Support/Cherish/ — This includes VIP data, face embeddings, scan results, trip/event metadata, teaching confirmations, and search hints.
• Photos & exports: ~/Pictures/Cherish/ — Exported memory folders and photo collections you create in Cherish go here by default.

Your original photos are never moved or modified — Cherish reads them in place from wherever they live on your system.

Backing up is straightforward:

• Plug in an external drive (USB, Thunderbolt, or network-attached)
• Open Cherish and go to Backup in the sidebar
• Select your drive as the backup destination
• Cherish will copy your photo library to the drive — incrementally on subsequent backups

All backups are local only. Cherish never backs up to iCloud, Dropbox, or any online service. Your photos stay on drives you control.

Yes — this is our most important promise. Cherish is built with what we call the Sacred Data Guard.

The work you put into Cherish — identifying your VIPs, confirming faces, organizing trips, building memory folders — is sacred. We guarantee it survives every update:

• VIP names and face identifications are preserved
• Scan results (which photos are of whom) are preserved
• Teaching confirmations and rejections are preserved
• Trip and event names, labels, and search hints are preserved
• Memory folders and saved photo collections are preserved
• Backup manifests and external drive maps are preserved

If a future version of Cherish changes its data format, we write a migration — we never wipe existing data. Ever.

Cherish looks at the timestamps and location metadata in your photos and finds natural clusters — periods when you were taking lots of photos, likely because something was happening.

• A burst of photos over a few days in a new location → detected as a Trip
• A cluster of photos over a few hours → detected as an Event
• Long gaps between clusters → natural boundaries between trips/events

Cherish gives each detected trip/event a smart name based on the date and location, and you can rename or merge them however you like.

All of this analysis happens entirely on your Mac — no GPS data or timestamps are sent anywhere.

Yes. Cherish works with photos wherever they live — internal drive, external USB drive, Thunderbolt SSD, or a network-attached storage device (NAS).

• Add any folder as a source in Cherish's library settings
• If the drive is disconnected, Cherish remembers your scan results and shows them when the drive reconnects
• Cherish stores a map of your external drive locations so it can find them again

We built this specifically for people with large photo archives that don't fit on a MacBook's internal drive.

No. Cherish works entirely offline. Every feature — face recognition, scanning, search, trip detection, backup — works without an internet connection.

In fact, Cherish never makes network requests at all during normal use. There's nothing to connect to.

Yes. Cherish is designed to work with the photos real families actually have:

• HEIC / HEIF photos from iPhone (including Live Photos)
• JPEG and PNG photos from any camera
• RAW files from DSLR and mirrorless cameras
• Videos (for organizational purposes)
• Older scanned prints and archival images

Face recognition works on HEIC, JPEG, PNG, and most RAW formats. Some very old or obscure formats may require conversion first.