Placelore

Placelore is a private place journal for your real life.

It runs quietly in the background, notices when you've actually settled somewhere, and turns each stay into a place you can name, revisit, and write about. No check-ins. No feed. No friends list. Just your own log of where you've been.

WHAT IT DOES • Detects places automatically from how long you stay, not from what's nearby. • Lets you rename, recategorize, or merge places so the log matches how you actually think about them. • Attaches journal entries and photos to each place — a quick note from a coffee shop, a longer entry from a trip. • Counts visits and tracked time so you can see your real-world patterns over a week, a month, or longer. • Shows your day on a map: the places you stopped, the path between them, and how long each stay lasted. • Sends gentle milestone notifications when a place reaches 5, 10, 25, 50, or 100 visits. • Categorizes places by type — Restaurant, Cafe, Gym, Park, and more — using Apple Maps, with custom categories you can add yourself.

WHY IT'S DIFFERENT Most location apps want to broadcast where you are. Placelore is the opposite: it's a logbook you keep for yourself. The dwell-based detection means you only get places you actually spent time at, not every storefront you walked past. The journal and photo attachments turn raw location history into something worth looking back on.

PRIVACY BY DEFAULT • All data is stored on your device. There is no Placelore server. • No accounts, no sign-in, no analytics SDKs, no advertising identifiers. • Your places, visits, photos, and journal entries never leave your iPhone unless you explicitly export them. • Background location is used only to detect dwell time. You can pause tracking for 1, 4, or 24 hours from inside the app. • You can delete every place, visit, photo, and journal entry from Settings at any time.

CONTROL • Set the minimum stay duration that counts as a real visit (default: 30 minutes). • Pause and resume tracking whenever you want. • Export your raw location samples as CSV for your own analysis. • Delete individual places or wipe everything from Settings.

REQUIREMENTS • iPhone running iOS 17 or later. • "Always" location permission for passive background detection. • Camera and Photos permissions only if you choose to attach pictures.

Placelore is for people who want to remember their own life, quietly. If that's you, give it a try.