This connection exists so a photo can be part of a record rather than something you keep somewhere else: a progress shot against a habit, a plate against a meal, a picture from the run you just finished.
What Beacon reads
The photos you choose, through Apple's own picker. Beacon receives the images you select and nothing around them, so granting access does not hand over your library.
There is one place Beacon looks more widely, and only when you ask it to. After a workout, it can suggest photos from that session by reading library metadata:
- Capture time, to find the photos taken while the session was running.
- Location, when the session recorded a GPS route — photos are ranked by how close they were taken to the path.
A photo shot far from your route still appears, but isn't pre-selected, on the assumption you were somewhere else during the same hour. Nothing is uploaded until you pick it.
What Beacon writes back
Beacon can save an image to your photo library when you ask it to — a shared card, a progress image. That is a separate iOS permission from reading, so you can allow one without the other.
Beacon never deletes or edits anything in your library.
History and freshness
There's no import and no background scan. Reading happens at the moment you open the picker or ask for suggestions, and nothing is indexed in between.
Photos you attach are compressed and stored on your phone first, then uploaded in the background to Beacon's media storage. The local copy is why an attached progress photo shows instantly and still appears with no signal, and it means an upload interrupted mid-flight resumes rather than losing the picture.
Good to know
- Photos are masked in session replay. Beacon's product analytics can record how screens are used, and every photo surface — attached images, the meal photo sheet, the camera viewfinder — is marked so the image itself is blacked out before anything is recorded.
- You can use the app fully without this. Habits, meals and workouts all log without a photo; refusing access removes the attachment, not the record.
- Suggestions need the session's route to rank by place. An indoor workout, or one recorded without location, falls back to capture time alone, which on a busy afternoon can surface photos that have nothing to do with the session.