Last updated October 5, 2026
Your plant list, sightings, notes, photos and locations are stored on your iPhone. There are no accounts, no analytics and no advertising. To identify a plant, a copy of the photo with all location and camera data removed is sent through our server to Pl@ntNet. To fill in bee notes and names, plant species names are looked up with our server, OpenAI, GBIF and Wikipedia. Where you saw a plant never leaves your phone unless you export a backup yourself.
Everything you record is stored only on your iPhone: your list of plants, every sighting and its date, where each sighting was (its map coordinates), how much was blooming, your notes, your photos, your forage areas and their center points, your edits to bee notes, and the names you gave things. We have no copy and no way to see it. Deleting the app removes it, so export a backup first if you want to keep it.
Your photos are kept exactly as they came from the camera or your library, including the location and date stored inside them, so the app can fill in when and where you saw the plant. That original never leaves your phone; see the next section for the copy that is sent to identify it.
When you log a sighting, or choose "Use my current location" for a forage area, the app asks your iPhone's location services for your current location (only if you allow it), and keeps it on your phone.
The app makes a smaller copy of the photo (about 1280 pixels across) with all embedded data removed — location, date, camera details and every other tag. Only that copy is sent, to our server, which forwards it to Pl@ntNet to suggest the three most likely species. Nothing is sent with it: no location, no notes, no name, and nothing that identifies you or your device. Our server does not keep the photo. Pl@ntNet receives it from our server, so it sees our server's internet address, not yours. Pl@ntNet's own terms and privacy policy apply to the photos it receives.
For a plant matched to a known species, the app sends that species' scientific name and its GBIF number (a public catalogue number for the species) to our server. Our server checks the number with GBIF and then, unless the species has already been looked up before, sends only the species name to OpenAI to write the notes. The answer is stored on our server under the species name and shared with everyone who logs that species, so it isn't linked to you. Names you type in without a match are never sent for bee notes.
When you enter a plant by name, the text you type is sent to GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) to find matching species. The app also sends GBIF a plant's scientific name or GBIF number to find its usual common name, and the scientific name of a photo match to find its GBIF number.
For a plant with no photo of your own, the app sends the species' scientific name to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to find a freely licensed picture and its credit, and downloads that picture. The app identifies itself to Wikimedia by name with our support address as the contact, as Wikimedia asks. The picture is stored on your phone and credited under Settings › Photo credits.
GBIF and Wikimedia are contacted directly from your phone, so, like any website, they see your device's internet address. Only the names and numbers described above are sent — never your location, notes, photos or anything about you. These lookups can happen in the background, for example when you open the app or a plant.
When a sighting or forage area is shown on a map, Apple Maps loads the map for that area from Apple.
With Forage Journal Pro, the app keeps a small forage report in a shared folder on your phone that Hive Journal, from the same developer, can read. It contains what's in bloom and coming up in each forage area: plant names (only names that came from Pl@ntNet or GBIF, never names you typed), their honey flow, nectar and pollen ratings, how much was blooming, dates, the names and ID numbers of your forage areas, and the forage conditions gauge.
It never contains locations of any kind — no coordinates, no forage area center points — and never your notes or photos. It stays on your phone unless you send it yourself with Send forage report. If Pro ends, the report is removed from the shared folder. What Hive Journal does with it is described in Hive Journal's privacy policy.
Apple handles Forage Journal Pro purchases, renewals, the free trial and refunds. We never see your payment details, your Apple ID or your name. The app checks whether you subscribe with Apple, on your phone; our server is never told.
To apply the free and Pro limits, the app keeps a few counts on your phone and nowhere else:
Our server runs on Cloudflare. Like any host, Cloudflare sees your device's internet address when the app connects. Cloudflare's automatic per-request records, which would hold that address and an approximate location, are turned off for our server.
What it keeps:
When those daily totals get close to a limit, an alert with only the counts and the date is sent to us through ntfy, a notification service.
Every copy of the app sends the same key to our server so it can refuse other callers. That key is identical for everyone and does not identify you.
Pl@ntNet identifies photos sent through our server, as described above.
OpenAI writes bee notes from a species name. Under their published API terms, what we send is not used to train their models, and their abuse-monitoring logs are retained for up to thirty days unless longer retention is legally required or necessary to protect their service.
GBIF and Wikimedia (Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons) provide plant names, catalogue numbers and reference photos.
Cloudflare hosts our server.
Apple provides maps and location services and handles all payments and subscriptions.
The app contains no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking software of any kind, and there are no accounts to create.
You can export a backup at any time from Settings. A backup file contains everything: your plants, sightings, notes and edits, your forage areas and their center points, the locations of your sightings, and your original photos, which still carry the location stored inside them. You choose where the file goes — Files, iCloud Drive, AirDrop or email — so keep it as carefully as you would the journal itself. Deleting the app removes everything stored on your phone except the photo identification count described above. We hold nothing that identifies you.
This app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
We will update this page and the date at the top when anything here changes.