Amber Archive

The app your memories live in keeps everything over 5 GB on what it calls temporary storage. Twelve months of it, announced in September 2025. Amber gets yours out before that runs out, for free, and then gives them somewhere to live. WHAT THE EXPORT ACTUALLY GIVES YOU You can request your memories for free, straight from the app that holds them. What arrives is harder to use than people expect. None of the files carry a capture date. Import them naively and ten years of photos all land stamped with today. The real dates, along with the locations, sit in a separate index file. Your captions and drawings come as separate transparent images that have to be laid back over the photo. Amber puts it back together. Real capture dates. Real locations. Captions merged back onto the picture where they belong. IT TELLS YOU WHAT IT COULD NOT GET Most importers quietly show you fewer memories than you had. Amber counts everything, and if something could not be rescued it says so, says which, and says why. This matters more than it sounds. The export hands over fewer memories than its own index counts, and nothing tells you why. Silence about the difference would have looked like the app losing them. One thing to know before you start: memories in My Eyes Only are counted in that index but are never included in the export. That is the usual reason an archive comes up short, and no app can rescue them, including this one. THEY STAY YOURS Your memories land in a folder you choose, ideally iCloud Drive, as ordinary files with real dates. Not dumped unsorted into your camera roll. Not locked inside this app. Amber reaches that folder through permission you grant, which iOS enforces. It never holds a copy. Delete the app tomorrow and everything is exactly where you left it, and opens in anything. Which is also the catch, and worth saying plainly: this is not a backup, and there is no copy of your memories anywhere except the folder you chose. Keep that folder in iCloud Drive, or another cloud that syncs and is backed up. On one phone alone, a lost phone is a lost archive. And check before you delete anything at the source. Nothing here can promise your export was complete, because nothing outside that app can see what it still holds. AND THEN IT KEEPS GOING The rescue is the beginning. On This Day. One memory a day, from every year you have, every morning. Timeline. Ten years, scrubbable, jump to any date. Map. Everywhere you have been, clustered into places you will recognise. Widget. Today's memory on your Home Screen. THE PRICE, SAID UP FRONT Getting your memories out is free, and it stays free. The rescue, the real dates and places put back, the captions laid down again, the files sitting in a folder you own. You can stop there, pay nothing, and keep all of it. The one-time purchase is for what happens afterwards: the memory each morning, the timeline, the map, the widget. It is offered after your first import has already worked, never before. No subscription. No ads. No account. Nothing leaves your phone. Amber is an independent app, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the service your export comes from. It has no access to that service's servers and cannot retrieve anything already deleted there. It reads the export file you requested yourself.