Pricing

The app is free. It provides all features above except automatic processing: it identifies objects that could be filed or cleared, and you approve each action.

There is no subscription. The bundle provides automatic processing: identifying contacts in new photos, identifying locations, applying matching buckets, geolocation and mapping, and clearing unwanted objects. The Map screen and distance searches ("my contacts within 10 km of me") come with it as well.

What each premium feature does

Feature	Description
Identifying contacts	The picture on a contact's card tells Buckets what they look like, so every photo of them is found and is associated with them — ask for "pictures of Sarah" and every matching photo appears, with nothing tagged by hand. A face it cannot assign a name to is a pile on the Faces screen: open it to see the pictures that face is in, select the matching photos — or all of them at once — and identify the contacts or add the photos to a bucket. A pile carries a contact's name only where the face on that contact's card is the pile's own face, so the other people in their group photos are never named after them, and a name the faces contradict is taken back — what you said yourself stands. A pile given the wrong name uses Remove contact, which removes the contact and discards the guesses that assigned it, so it is not suggested again. The screen reads what was worked out when the photos were first read, so it draws at once and never looks at a picture again. A face turned away, in poor light or partly hidden, and photos taken among confirmed matches, are presented for confirmation rather than assigned automatically: a Maybe line on their card says how many, and opening it shows them as thumbnails. On a fresh install, when a card's only picture is the address book's small one, the card names nobody by itself but asks: the photos that look like them wait under Maybe until you confirm, and the confirmations teach the card what they really look like. They are gathered under the reason they are being asked about — the face in them, or the company they were taken in — and answered at whatever size suits: tap the ones that are them, select a whole group, and Yes or No to the group or to the selected objects, with No as plain as Yes. Where there are more of a reason than fit on the screen, Dismiss all and Confirm all answer every one of them — hundreds taken among their photos in one tap, with no need to page through them first. No more than a screenful is ever asked about one contact: past that the numbers are not telling contacts apart, and asking the same question for thousands of pictures is impractical. Nothing enters a search until you say yes. A thumbnail too small to answer for opens big from the ⤡ in its corner, while tapping the picture continues to select it, and two fingers on the grid change how many pictures across it draws. A photo is assigned to a contact only when the face in it matches the picture on their card, so adjacent photos are never assigned wholesale to the nearest contact. A face must be large enough to identify before it is assigned a name: the little round picture beside a message, or a face on a packet, counts as a contact being there but is never read as who they are. Your choices stay, whatever Buckets reads later; only what Buckets worked out on its own is taken back when the reading is corrected. Reading a phone-full of photos takes a while, so a search for a contact says how far it has got — "340 of 4,892 photos read", with a bar filling under it — rather than looking as though it found nothing. The contacts it finds appear as they are worked out, so the Faces screen has your piles on it while the rest are still being sorted. A picture of a contact is theirs first: what it is offered for is who is in it, not a bucket, a word or a day assigned it nearby. Buckets offers to file their photos where their photos appear — open a face and it says "37 of these look like they belong in New Year's Eve Party 2025", and one tap puts the rest of them in.
Identifying places	Where a photo or video was taken is read from the file itself, so the spot is found even where the phone keeps it back from the ordinary listing. Every new photo is checked against the places and trips you already have buckets for, and those buckets are applied to the photo. Buckets asks the phone for the place name once, when the photo's coordinates are first read, and kept with the photo — so the spot's own name where the phone can give one, or the town, becomes a word you can search by ("Navy Pier" or "Lincoln Park" finds the pictures taken there), and the Places screen names your spots the moment it opens instead of looking them up again. Your places and your trips are worked out once, from the coordinates the photos already carry, and written down; opening the screen reads that, and opening a place reads only the photos taken there. The screen reads as two lists, Trips and Places, each line saying plainly what it is and nothing else — "Trip 1 Sep 2021 - 3 nights", "Place - 111 photos". Tapping a line opens its objects, where objects are selected the way they are selected everywhere else — one, a range held down, or all of them — and added to a bucket. Places work only if location tagging is turned on in the phone’s camera settings. Screenshots, and photos shared by other people or downloaded from other apps, usually carry no location and are not placed.
Automatic filing	Whatever is identified in a new object — the contacts in it, where it was taken, its date — is turned into buckets and applied, so a photo arrives already filed in all of them. A contact always outranks a bucket: their name printed on a bank slip files the slip, never the contact or their photographs.

They are sold together as the one bundle above, not one at a time.

The Premium features screen states the reading time, before the bundle is bought and after it is on. Turning the bundle on starts a first reading of the photos and videos on the phone. It takes about 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on how many there are and how large they are. On Android the reading continues while you use other apps or the screen is off, with a notification showing while it runs; Android 15 and later allow this for 6 hours a day, after which it reads only while Buckets is open. On an iPhone it happens only while Buckets is open on the screen. While Buckets is open, the screen stays on until the reading is done. If the reading stops, it continues from where it stopped the next time Buckets is opened.

Everything above is on one screen in the app — Premium features, from the ☰ menu, or from any line saying a feature is bought — which names each feature and what it does, gives the one bundle price, and is the one place the extras are turned on.