I can’t login to my email account!

Here’s what goes wrong most of the time:

1. Are you using a supported account type? Currently Lost Photos supports: Gmail/Google Apps, Yahoo!, AOL, and iCloud/MobileMe/.Mac
2. Gmail: The most common reason that people can’t login to their email account using Lost Photos is that they have IMAP disabled on their gmail account. Go to your gmail settings, then to "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" and enable IMAP.
3. Gmail: Google sometimes puts limits on email logins. Take a look at their troubleshooting page and try the CAPTCHA reset. Gmail Login Help.
4. Gmail: Do you have two-step verification turned on for your gmail account? You will need to use an application-specific password, like you would for a desktop email client. How to use an application-specific password.
5. Hotmail: Lost Photos does not currently work with Hotmail. We may add support in the future.
6. Any email service: Make sure you have the correct password! Are you positive that you can login to your email account with that password? Sometimes browsers save passwords and you might forget what it is. Verify your password is correct by logging in to the website.

It's only finding a small number of photos in my Gmail account! I know I have more!

Most likely, your IMAP folder sizes are limited in Gmail settings. Changing this setting may affect other email/IMAP clients.

Check the following setting in your Gmail settings under the tab "Forwarding and POP/IMAP":

Where are my photos located on my hard drive?

The following folders work for standard OS and app configurations. "~" is your home directory.

Mac
Snow Leopard: ~/Lost Photos/Photos
Lion and Mountain Lion: ~/Library/Containers/com.SpaceInch.Lost-Photos/Data/Lost Photos/Photos

Windows
~/AppData/Local/Lost_Photos

What about Hotmail?

Officially, Lost Photos does NOT support Hotmail. However, starting in version 1.1 we have added some basic searching features as a courtesy to our users. Please note, the following info and suggestions are taken at your own risk. Space Inch (the makers of Lost Photos) will not be held responsible if your Hotmail account is altered using these techniques.

Hotmail uses POP3, an outdated, limited email technology. Because of this, Lost Photos can only find photos located in your Inbox. It won't find any in Sent Mail or any other folder you've created. We provide some instructions below on how you can get around this problem and find all the photos in your Hotmail account.

I don't use my Hotmail account anymore but I want to search for photos. Can I just copy all of my emails into to Inbox and run Lost Photos?

Yes, in fact this is pretty easy. In Hotmail/Outlook, select a folder, for example, "Sent". At the top of the message list there is a checkbox that will select all the emails in the current view. After you select it, a link will appear in the pane below your emails that reads, "Select everything in your Sent folder". Click this link, then in the top menu click "Move To > Inbox". By using this technique however, it is hard (in some cases, impossible) to get these emails back into their original folders. Don't use this technique if you want to keep your Hotmail account separated into subfolders.

I do use Hotmail account and want to keep my emails separated. Can I still use Lost Photos to search?

You can, but this is slightly more time-consuming. Before copying a folder into the Inbox, first, create a new Category that is specific to that folder (for example if you wanted to look in your Sent folder, you could create a category called "Sent Folder For Lost Photos", and using a similar technique to the previous example, assign every email in your Sent folder to that Category. Then, Move all of the emails to your Inbox, repeat for other folders and run Lost Photos. After it's done searching, you would select all of the emails categorized "Sent Folder For Lost Photos" and Move them back to "Sent", and, again, repeat for other folders.

That's annoying.

We agree. Unfortunately, that's the best we can do with Hotmail at the moment. We will continue to look for a better solution.

Anything else happening we haven’t mentioned here? Please email us and we’ll get right on top of it. Write to us at: hello@lostphotosapp.com