Curator

Two versions, one app

Livo is free, with no limits, and it is the whole loop: bring in your Camera Roll, name the people, name the event and add a line of story, make a Memory, seal a capsule, pass it on, make a gift. It works with your Camera Roll and iCloud, keeps copies in iCloud Drive and Files, and sends by AirDrop, Messages and Mail. Nothing to sign up for, and no limit on how much you make.

Curator is for the person who maintains the family’s photos: who has the shoebox of prints to scan, who has photos in many formats from many years, cameras, phones, drives, cards and cloud accounts, and who is trying to bring all of it into one place, name it, and make it available to the family for generations. Curator adds the tools for that. It is part of Livo Plus, the one purchase, shared with your Apple family, never a subscription; see Free, and Livo Plus for the whole plan, including what Plus adds for giving.

What Curator adds

• Scan Prints: printed photos in with the camera, a box at a time, with the words on them read for search. See Scan Prints.
• OneDrive: photos from OneDrive folders, backups copied off the phone, a second copy of every capsule in your own OneDrive, and capsules sent as links. See OneDrive and your accounts.
• Family Share and the Family Library: what each person in the family shares from their own OneDrive, and what they share back. See Family Share.
• Buckets under Organize: a shelf for photos you want out of sight but not gone (a burst’s thirty near-identical shots, the photos from a past relationship you are not ready to see every day). See People, Places, Life Events, Tags and Buckets.
• More Kinds: Reference and Saved images beside Selfie, Screenshot and Scan, with text recognition on them and Read text again in a photo’s Info.
• More marks: thumbs-down and Hide Thumbs Down, Picks, To Review.
• Deeper search: the longer grammar (commas, “and”, the Story pill).
• Clean up and review: Duplicate Check, Fix Dates from File Names, Earliest Dates, the Life Events clean-up, Find Missing Photos, Fix Live Photo Links and Read Apple’s Keywords and Ratings.
• Housekeeping: Media Sources, Where my photos are, Send to Photos, Check a backup drive.
• The full selection bar in the Gallery, with every action a tap away.

Nothing is hidden either way

Curator never hides data. Everything a Curator tool made stays readable when Curator is off: Buckets as read-only lists, OneDrive photos already brought in still in the Gallery, capsules already copied to OneDrive still copied. Turning Curator off changes what is shown, never what is kept. A link in this guide to a Curator tool shows what the tool is and a one-line note that it is part of Curator, never an error.

Turning it on

Settings › Curator is the switch, and it works with Livo Plus; without Plus, a tap on it shows what Plus is. On, Livo shows the Curator tools everywhere. Off, Livo is the essentials, and the Curator tools are together on one screen, Organize › Curator, where what they made stays readable.

The Curator screen

Open Organize › Curator. The Curator tools are on one screen, in four groups. Each link below opens that screen and marks the row for a moment; it never taps the row for you. These linked steps need a Livo build from 12 November 2026 or later (Settings › About › Build).

Sources

Where photos come from and where they live: Scan Prints, Media Sources and OneDrive Accounts. Add from Camera Roll and Add from OneDrive stay in the Gallery’s ≡ menu, under Add Photos.

Safekeeping

Backup & Restore, with the date of your last backup under its name. Check a backup drive is inside it. See Backing up and restoring.

Family

Family shows what the family shared, with a count of what is new. Receive from Family adds it to your Gallery. Family Share sets up your own sharing. Share to Family itself is in every share sheet, for the photos you have selected. See Family Share.

Clean up and review

Each one looks first and asks before it changes anything.

• Duplicate Check reports the photos Livo has more than once, with a button to clean them up.
• Fix Dates from File Names re-reads file names to correct dates already in Livo.
• Earliest Dates asks OneDrive again and uses the earliest date of each item.
• Life Events clean-up finds an anniversary recorded once for each person and offers to merge them, and finds Life Events that are missing their person.
• Find Missing Photos scans for photos whose original is in neither Photos nor OneDrive, then looks for them. Automatic links only the exact same file (same size and the same first 64 KB) and shows what it found before it changes anything; Manual goes through the photos one at a time, Livo’s copy beside each candidate. Story, tags and people always stay. Livo looks in Photos and in every signed-in OneDrive account. A photo found only in the other place is switched to it, and the old link is kept as a spare. Manual is for Camera Roll photos; OneDrive photos are matched automatically.
• Fix Live Photo Links clears a Live Photo link from a OneDrive photo that should never have had one (a LIVE badge playing the wrong clip).
• Read Apple’s Keywords and Ratings adds what you set in Photos to the Camera Roll photos already in Livo: keywords become tags, a caption becomes the story where Livo has none, and four or five stars become a thumbs-up. Nothing in Photos is changed.