How can we help?

A rock is your complete journey — the full arc from departure through arrival through experience, composed of the moments you captured along the way. Think of it as a chapter in a book: it has a beginning, middle, and end. Moments are the individual scenes within that chapter. When your journey ends, you finalize your rock and place it on any cairns where it belongs.

A rock is one person's (or one group's) single journey. A cairn is the collection of many rocks, built by many contributors over time. A rock is the chapter; a cairn is the book. Your family's cairn contains your rock, your partner's rock, your parents' rocks, your children's rocks — a multigenerational archive of all the places your family has traveled.

Yes — this is the "One Rock, Many Cairns" principle. You capture your journey once and can place it on any number of cairns where it belongs. For example, a trip to a destination wedding could live on the Event Cairn for the wedding, your family's Private Cairn, and a Shared Cairn for the destination city — each with different captions and different moments included. You never have to re-upload or re-create anything.

Private Cairns are owned by a family or close-knit group and grow over years and decades. The same people return to the same places, layering new rocks over time. They're the core product — intimate, generational, legacy-focused.

Event Cairns capture the convergence of many separate journeys to a single shared moment — a destination wedding, a family reunion, a corporate retreat. An organizer creates the cairn and invites contributors via code; each group captures their journey getting there.

Shared Cairns are open and communal — for large-scale public events where thousands of independent travelers all converge on the same place or experience. Major sporting events, music festivals, natural phenomena.

A moment is a single capture during an active journey — a photo, voice note, text entry, video clip, ambient audio recording, location check-in, GPS track segment, or linked post. Moments are the building blocks that together compose a rock. The app is intelligent about grouping related captures: a photo and a voice note captured within a few minutes at the same location are presented as a single moment rather than two separate entries.

Rocky is an AI-powered journey companion that lives in Cairn Memories. He is dormant between journeys and active during them — helping you notice and capture meaningful moments without turning your trip into a documentation exercise. Rocky is warm, contextually aware, and never intrusive. He goes quiet the moment your journey ends and doesn't check in between trips.

Rocky uses contextual signals: how long it's been since your last capture, whether you've arrived somewhere new, whether you've been in one place for a while (suggesting something meaningful is happening), time of day, and whether your current location has appeared in your cairn's history before. He uses this context to make relevant, timely suggestions — never more than once per hour, and never during your sleep hours.

Yes — this is the Capture Density setting. You can choose from Minimal (1–2 prompts per day), Balanced (3–5 per day, the default), or Rich (5–8 per day). You can change this at any point during a journey, and you can also just tell Rocky directly: "be quieter" or "check in more" — he'll adapt immediately and acknowledge the change.

Yes. Rocky can operate through your phone's native messaging interface (SMS or iMessage), appearing as a contact in your message list. You can send Rocky photos, text, and voice messages directly from your messaging app — all content syncs into your active journey in the app. You can also use both in-app and messaging simultaneously, with Rocky keeping everything in sync.

A Location Key is a condition you set on a rock or moment that reveals it only when the viewer physically arrives at a specific geographic location. The content exists in the cairn but is invisible until the location condition is met. It uses geofencing with a configurable radius — you don't have to be standing on the exact spot, just within a reasonable distance. This is the feature at the heart of the multigenerational promise: a grandparent's memory that a grandchild discovers only when they visit the same beach.

A Time Key reveals a rock or moment when a specific date or time arrives. The content waits — invisible — until the calendar catches up. You might use a Time Key for a message set to reveal on a child's 18th birthday, or an anniversary memory that surfaces on the date every year, or a rock you want to share with family after a specific amount of time has passed.

Yes — Combined Keys require both conditions to be met before content reveals. A classic example: a parent creates a rock during a family trip to Rome, keyed to the Colosseum and to their child's 16th birthday. The rock waits, invisible, until the child is both in Rome and has turned 16. The intersection of where you are and when you are creates something uniquely meaningful.

Privacy flows from the cairn down to the rock down to the individual moment. You control visibility at each level. Private Cairns are visible only to members you invite. Individual moments can be marked private (only you) or family-only (cairn members but excluded from external shares). Rocks can be set to cairn members only, anyone with a link, or specific cairns. The default for all Private Cairn content is members-only.

Rocky only accesses data during an active journey, and only the data needed to be helpful: your current GPS location, time, journey metadata (start time, destination, capture history), and your cairn history for history-based prompts. Rocky does not access your phone contacts, call logs, message content, social media accounts, browser history, or any data when no journey is active.

Yes. Your rocks are yours. Cairn Memories does not claim ownership of your moments, your photos, your voice notes, or your rock narratives. You decide where your rock lives and how it's presented. If you delete your content, it's gone.