Sally Does Data

Help, for when something is not right

Something is not working. Let us sort it out.

Find the sentence below that sounds most like what just happened to you. Each one says what is probably going on, then exactly what to do about it, naming the buttons you will actually see on the screen. Take your time — none of this is urgent, and none of it is about to get worse while you read.

First, the reassuring part

Three things are true no matter what has gone wrong, and they cover most of what people are actually worried about when they arrive here.

You did not break it.

Nothing you can click on this website deletes a photo from your computer, your phone, or your drives. Not “Remove from library”, not merging duplicates, not even deleting your entire account. Sally reads your files; she does not rearrange them.

Nothing went public.

Every item is private the moment it arrives and stays that way until you deliberately turn on a share link for a collection. There is no feed, no public profile, and nobody browsing anybody else’s library.

Nothing you typed is stuck.

Every title, date, place and tag can be changed later on the item’s own page, as many times as you like. A wrong answer today is a perfectly good answer to correct on Thursday.

Which of these sounds like you?

Click one and it will take you straight there.

None of them fit? Skip to writing to a person, at the bottom.

The front door

Before anything else: actually getting into your library.

I cannot sign in.

What is probably happening. Nearly always one of three small things: a stray space on the end of something, Caps Lock, or an email address typed slightly differently from the one you signed up with. The awkward part is that Sally cannot send email at all yet, so there is no reset link to click — which means the last resort is a person unlocking it by hand rather than a robot emailing you a form.

What to try

  1. Go to sallydoesdata.com and click Sign in at the top, just to the left of the red button.
  2. Put the address you signed up with into Email address. It has to be that one exactly — a different address is a different account, even if both are yours.
  3. In the Password box, click Show at the right-hand end and read what you actually typed. Capital letters count, spaces count, and if Caps Lock is on Sally says so underneath.
  4. If it answers Email or password is incorrect, try once more, slowly. If it answers Too many attempts. Wait a few minutes and try again, that is a safety limit doing its job and not a problem with your account — your password still works. Wait five minutes.
  5. Still locked out? At the bottom of the sign-in card, open Forgot your password? and write to hello@sallydoesdata.com from the address you signed up with. A person gets you back in by hand, usually inside a day.

Two honest notes. Sally sends no email whatsoever, so there is no confirmation message hiding in your spam folder and nothing to click. And if the signup form ever asks you for an Invite code, that means signups are invite-only that day — ask for a code at the same address.

Adding photos and files

The part where things arrive — or appear not to.

My photos did not upload.

What is probably happening. Uploading happens from the page you are looking at, three files at a time, and Sally reports what happened when she is done. So the usual culprits are the tab closing or the computer going to sleep partway through, one file being over the 50 MB limit, a very large pile bumping into an hourly safety limit, or a second batch dropped in before the first had finished. The line underneath the progress bar names which it was.

What to try

  1. Go to Home and read the line under the progress bar. When Sally finishes she says Done! 12 files added, and then, when it applies, either “3 were already in your library — matched by fingerprint before uploading a single byte” (good news, see the next problem) or “1 failed — try those again.”
  2. If some failed, add just those files again. It is the same box: Add more files on Home, or Drop photos or files here — or click to choose while your library is still empty.
  3. If absolutely nothing happened when you dropped files in, check whether the previous batch had finished. Sally deliberately ignores a second pile dropped on top of one she is still working through, because the counting would go haywire. Wait for Done! and then drop the rest.
  4. If one particular file keeps failing, look at its size. This website takes files up to 50 MB each — roomy for photos and documents, tight for long videos. Anything bigger is a job for the Sally app, which catalogs files where they sit, at any size, without uploading them at all.
  5. If you dropped many hundreds of files at once, you may have met the hourly limit — 600 files an hour per account, there so one small server survives the week. Wait an hour and add the rest, or use the Sally app on Sources, which has no such limit.
  6. While the bar is moving, leave the tab open and the computer awake. The files are being sent by that page: close it, and the ones still queued simply never left.

Nothing is lost when an upload stops halfway. Sally fingerprints each file before sending it, so adding the same pile again picks up only what is missing — everything that already arrived is recognized and skipped in a fraction of a second. You can re-drop the whole folder without making a mess, which is exactly the point of fingerprinting.

From a phone, open sallydoesdata.com in the browser and tap the add box; your normal photo picker opens. If the phone locks itself partway, the same rule applies — unlock it, come back, and add them again.

It uploaded, but I only see a little icon instead of my picture.

What is probably happening. The file arrived and is properly cataloged — Sally just cannot draw a preview of it. Three kinds of thing look like this today: iPhone photos in Apple’s HEIC format, videos (which get a clapperboard on purpose, because moving previews are not built yet), and documents. The dates, places and labels all came through. Only the picture is missing.

What to try

  1. Click the item to open its page. If When and Where have sensible values in them, it worked — Sally read the camera’s hidden notes even though she could not draw the photograph.
  2. Look at Where this file lives further down that page. It names the file and its type, which tells you which of the three you are looking at.
  3. For iPhone photos, the lasting fix is on the phone: Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible, which makes it save ordinary JPEGs from then on. Photos you have already taken stay as they are.
  4. If one particular photo matters enough to want a picture in your library, convert or export it to JPEG on your computer and add that copy. Fair warning: a converted copy is a genuinely different file, so it arrives as a new item rather than filling in the old one. Worth doing for a favorite, not for four thousand.

One knock-on effect: Duplicates works by comparing what pictures look like, so files with no preview are never compared. If your duplicate list looks suspiciously short, that is usually why.

And one wrinkle if you use both ways in. Photos handed to this website have their camera dates read even when they are HEIC, but the Sally app on your computer reads camera dates, locations and previews out of ordinary JPEGs only. So an iPhone library cataloged by the app arrives carrying file dates rather than camera dates — which brings us neatly to the next problem.

Sally says my file is already in my library, but I cannot see it.

What is probably happening. She is right, and it is almost never where you are looking. Sally recognizes files by their fingerprint rather than their name, so a photo you added before — under any name, from any folder — gets attached to the item that already exists instead of becoming a second one. That item keeps its original place in a library ordered by when each thing first arrived. So the photo you just re-added does not jump to the top of the grid; it is sitting quietly wherever it landed the first time.

What to try

  1. Open Library, empty the search box, click the Everything chip, and set the type menu back to All types. A filter left switched on from last time hides most of a library.
  2. Now click the Junk pile chip. Anything you marked 🗑 Junk in Review is deliberately kept out of every other view, and this is far and away the most common reason something seems to have vanished. Nothing was deleted — open the item and click the red 🗑 Marked junk chip in its Details card to take it back out of the pile.
  3. Search for a word you know you typed about it — a title, a place, a tag. Not the file name; see the next problem for why that matters.
  4. If you know roughly when the photo was taken, go to Timeline and scroll to that month. It is often quicker than searching.
  5. When you find it, open it and read Where this file lives. Every copy Sally knows of is listed there, including the one you just added and the folder it came from. That list is the proof she was not making it up.

Two other ways an item hides in plain sight. If you merged it in Duplicates, it now lives inside the copy you kept — which remembers every place that file exists, so nothing was thrown away. And if you once clicked Remove from library, Sally’s record of it really is gone (the file on your own drive was not touched). Adding it again after a removal makes a fresh item, and that one does appear at the top.

Dates, and finding things again

The two complaints that turn out to be the same complaint.

The dates are wrong.

What is probably happening. Sally takes the best date she can get, in this order: the note your camera wrote inside the photo at the moment it was taken, and failing that, the file’s own modified date from your computer. That second one is a guess, and often a poor one — copying a file to a new drive, downloading it from Google or Facebook, or scanning an old print all stamp a recent date onto something from 1974. Sally tells you which source she used, right on the item, so you never have to wonder whether a date is worth believing.

What to try

  1. Open the item and look at the When field in the Details card. It is labeled (from the camera) when the date came from inside the photo, and (file date — confirm it) when it is only the file’s date — which is a polite way of saying please do not trust this.
  2. Click the date box and pick the right date. It saves as you go; there is no Save button to hunt for, and no way to lose the change by navigating away.
  3. To fix a great many quickly, go to Review. Where Sally has a doubtful date she shows it — “The file says 7/4/2019 — correct it if that’s wrong, or confirm” — with a teal That’s right ✓ button beside the date box. Confirming is one click, and a date a human vouched for is worth more than one a camera claimed.
  4. If Review deals you a group card — These 6 look like the same moment — you can set one date for the whole batch with the Save for all 6 button.
  5. To see everything still undated, open Library and click the No date chip, or use the yellow banner across the top of Timeline, which counts them and offers Fix them in Review →.

The date box wants a whole day — year, month and day — so when all you know is the year, pick a sensible day inside it and put the honest version in the title or the story: “sometime in the summer of 1974.” A rough date puts the photo in the right stretch of your timeline, which is most of the value.

And if a camera’s clock was simply wrong — never set after a battery change, or left on the wrong time zone — then every photo from that trip is wrong by the same amount. Annoying, but they come right in a quick run through Review, since you already know the correct answer for all of them.

I cannot find a photo I know is in there.

What is probably happening. The search box reads what you wrote — titles, the story, places — plus the names of your tags. It does not read file names. So searching for IMG_2847 finds nothing at all, even with the photo sitting right there, and searching for a word you never typed cannot work either. Everything else is a filter left switched on from last time.

What to try

  1. In Library, empty the search box, click Everything, and set the type menu to All types. Now you are genuinely looking at the whole library.
  2. Scroll to the bottom and click Show more if it is there. The grid arrives sixty at a time, so “I scrolled and it was not there” is often just the end of the first page.
  3. Click the Junk pile chip. Junked items are hidden from every other view on purpose.
  4. Search a word you know you typed. Whole words work best, and Sally is forgiving about endings — firework finds fireworks. Two words means both must appear.
  5. Search a tag from its beginning. Tags match from the front, so Mom finds the tag Mom’s garden, but garden on its own will not.
  6. If you know roughly when it was taken, Timeline beats searching. Just remember that an item with no date is not on the timeline at all — it is in Library, under the No date chip.

If it turns out you never labeled the photo, no amount of searching will find it by word, because there are no words on it yet. That is the entire reason Review exists, and the honest answer to why Sally keeps asking: a photo nobody described is a photo nobody can find — including you, and including any AI assistant you connect later. Five minutes in Review makes a few dozen items findable forever.

Sharing, exporting, and leaving

How to let one person see one thing — and how to walk out with everything.

I want to share just one album, not everything.

What is probably happening. That is precisely what a collection is for. Nothing in your library is visible to another soul until you make a collection, put things in it, and deliberately turn on a link. Even then, only the items inside that collection can be seen — nothing else of yours, and no door from that page into the rest of your library.

What to try

  1. Click Collections in the top menu. Type a name into the box that says New collection name… — “Mom’s 80th”, “House papers” — and click the red Create button.
  2. Click your new collection to open it, then click the white + Add items button. Click each item you want; each one drops in as you click it. Click Done when you have finished.
  3. Click the red Share by link button. Sally stops and spells out what is about to happen: anyone with the link can view these items and only these items; items currently marked Private will be switched to Shareable; and you can turn the link off whenever you like.
  4. Say yes, and a teal banner appears holding your web address — something like sallydoesdata.com/s/a1b2c3. Click Copy share link and paste it into an email or a text message. Whoever opens it needs no account and nothing installed.
  5. To take one thing back out, hover over it inside the collection and click Remove in its corner. To pull it off every shared page at once, open the item and set its Privacy back to Private — that takes effect immediately, even while the link stays live.
  6. To end the whole thing, open the collection and click Turn off sharing in the banner. The page stops working at once, for everybody.

Three things worth knowing before you press send. The link is unlisted, not password-protected — like an unlisted phone number, anyone handed it can open it, including whoever it gets forwarded to. Search engines are told to stay away. And the page shows only the collection’s name, the pictures, their dates and places, and whatever you wrote about them.

Items with no preview — videos, iPhone HEIC photos, documents — appear there as a tile reading No preview. Nothing is broken; it just means that if you want to send somebody a page of pictures, fill it with pictures. Your visitor can tap any photo to open it larger in a new tab and save it the way they normally save a picture.

I want my things out of here.

What is probably happening. Good — that door is meant to be easy, and it is free on every plan, forever. What comes out is everything you wrote (titles, stories, dates, places, tags, ratings) along with every fingerprint and every path Sally knows. The files themselves are a separate question, and the answer depends on whether Sally was ever holding them in the first place.

What to try

  1. Click Export in the top menu. There are four red buttons and you are welcome to press all four.
  2. Download .csv — a spreadsheet, one row per copy of each file. This is the one that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, and the one to hand an insurer, an attorney, or your family.
  3. Download .jsonld — the richest version, written in vocabulary that search engines and AI tools already understand. Download .tar — small sidecar files for Lightroom Classic and digiKam: drop each one next to the photo it is named after and your titles, keywords, people, places, ratings and GPS appear in that program. Download .db — the whole catalog as a single SQLite file, which will still open in twenty years without anyone’s permission.
  4. For the files themselves, open any item and look at Where this file lives. A line reading ☁️ Stored with Sally has a Download link beside it — that is a file you handed over, and you can take it straight back. A line reading 📍 Cataloged in place was never uploaded: that file is already yours, sitting at the path shown.
  5. Export before you delete anything. It is the only step on this page that cannot be done afterwards.

The honest gap: there is no single button yet that hands you your files and your labels together in one bundle. It is listed as Coming soon on the Export page because it genuinely is not written yet. Everything described above works today, and every one of those exports is also a live web address you can point a backup script at, if that is the sort of thing you enjoy.

I want to stop using Sally.

What is probably happening. There are four sizes of stopping, and most people want one of the smaller ones. None of them needs a phone call, and there is nobody standing in the doorway trying to talk you out of it.

What to try

  1. Just for now: click Sign out in the top-right corner. Nothing is deleted; your library is exactly where you left it whenever you come back.
  2. Stop the programs: go to Settings, find the card called Access keys (API tokens), click the red Revoke beside a key and then Yes, revoke it. Whatever was using it — the Sally app, an AI assistant, a script of your own — stops that second. Your catalog is untouched.
  3. Stop the sharing: open Collections, open each one marked shared 🔗, and click Turn off sharing. Those pages go dead immediately.
  4. Delete everything: Settings, then Delete your account. Export first — the page puts an Open the Export page button right there for exactly that reason. Then type your email address into the box and click the red Delete my account forever. It happens at once and all in one go, with no waiting period, no undo, and no confirmation email.
  5. Make your own computer forget: delete two small files in your home folder, ~/.sallydoesdata.json (the key) and ~/.sallydoesdata-cache.json (its memory of what it has already seen).

What deleting does not touch: every file cataloged in place. Those are on your own computers and drives, exactly where they have always been — Sally only ever held their fingerprints, so there is nothing of theirs for her to delete. Anything you already exported stays yours too.

There is also no subscription to cancel. Nobody is being charged anything today, so stopping costs you nothing but the click.

The Sally app on your computer

The optional program that catalogs whole drives without uploading them. When it will not talk to your library, it says why — in a line beginning with ✗.

The Sally app on my computer will not connect.

What is probably happening. Nine times in ten it is one of three things: the terminal is not looking in the folder where the app landed, the access key was pasted wrong (or was never saved anywhere, since it is only ever shown once), or the server address picked up a typo. The app does not guess — it prints a line beginning with ✗ and stops, and that line tells you which of the three it was.

What to try

  1. “command not found” or “is not recognized” — the terminal is not in the folder the file downloaded into. Type cd ~/Downloads and press Return first. On a Mac you also need chmod +x sally once, which tells your Mac the file is allowed to run.
  2. ✗ That doesn’t look like a Sally token (they start with “sally_”) — the paste did not land, or landed short. Nothing appears on screen while you paste a key, because the typing is hidden on purpose; that is normal, not a broken keyboard. Copy the whole key, sally_ and all, and paste it again.
  3. ✗ Could not verify the token against https://sallydoesdata.com — the key is wrong, has been revoked, or the address has a typo in it. Make a fresh one: Settings → the Access keys (API tokens) card → type a name like “laptop” under Make a new key → the red Create key button → Copy. It is shown exactly once and cannot be emailed to you, so put it somewhere safe before you leave that page. Then run the app again, paste the new key, and revoke the old one afterwards.
  4. ✗ Not logged in. Run: node sally.mjs login — do the login step, or simply run sally go, which starts the login for you when it needs to.
  5. When it asks which server — press Return to accept https://sallydoesdata.com. Typing it out by hand is where the typos come from.
  6. ⚠ batch failed (network error) — will retry next run — your connection wobbled. Nothing was lost and nothing was silently skipped: those files are deliberately not remembered as done, so running the same command again picks them straight back up.
  7. It ran, but nothing appeared on Sources — check you did not use --dry-run, which reports what it found and sends nothing at all, on purpose. Otherwise the Sources page quietly refreshes itself while you watch it, and offers a Check now button while it is still waiting for a first scan.
  8. It found nothing, or missed a drive — point it straight at the folder instead: sally scan ~/Pictures. An external drive has to be plugged in and open in Finder or File Explorer at the time. Sally also steps around certain places on purpose: hidden folders, system and program folders, caches, and the Apple Photos library, which is a sealed package rather than a folder. If your pictures live inside Apple Photos, export the ones you care about to an ordinary folder and scan that.
  9. Your Mac asks whether Terminal may see your Desktop or Documents — say OK. That is macOS being careful on your behalf, and if you decline, Sally simply cannot see those folders.
  10. The Mac says it cannot check the app for malware — right-click the file in Finder, choose Open, then Open again. It only ever asks once.
  11. To see where you stand — run sally status. It prints the server it is pointed at, the first few characters of the key it is using, and how many files it remembers having scanned.

If you took the single-file version rather than the ready-made app, every command above begins node sally.mjs instead of sally, and it needs Node.js 18 or newer — node --version tells you what you have.

None of these commands writes to a file of yours. The only things the app leaves on your computer are the two small settings files in your home folder mentioned above: one holding your key, one remembering what it has already seen. Delete them and it forgets you entirely.

When none of that helps, write to a person

The address is hello@sallydoesdata.com, and a person reads it — one person, in fact, who is also the entire staff. There is no ticket number, no chatbot in the doorway, and no phone tree. A reply usually turns up within a day.

What to put in the message, so it can actually be diagnosed

None of this is a form. Anything you can answer helps; anything you cannot, skip.

  1. The email address on your account. Writing from that address is easiest, since it is the only thing that ties a message to a library.
  2. What you were trying to do, in your own words, and what happened instead. “I dragged 40 photos in and only 12 showed up” is a perfect bug report.
  3. The exact words on the screen. A photograph of the screen taken with your phone is ideal — better than a description, and nobody is judging the photography.
  4. The web address of the page you were on. It looks like sallydoesdata.com/app/library, and it says a great deal in eight words.
  5. Computer or phone, and which browser — Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox. Some problems only happen in one of them.
  6. Roughly when it happened. “Tuesday evening” is precise enough to find it in the logs.
  7. For the Sally app: what sally status prints, plus the last handful of lines the app printed before it stopped. Those lines are usually the whole answer.

Please do not send

  • Your password. Nobody here will ever ask for it, for any reason.
  • An access key. If you think one has gone astray, revoke it in Settings and make another — that takes a second and fixes it completely.
  • The file itself, unless you are asked. The name and the error message are almost always enough.

While you wait

Nothing is on fire. Your files are still on your own drives, your catalog is not going anywhere, and the worst case here is that you wait a day for an answer.

If you would rather read than write, the questions and answers page covers what Sally does, what she refuses to do, and the honest list of what is not built yet.

Write to a personBack to your library

A few things worth knowing anyway

Sally never emails you

No confirmations, no password resets, no “your scan has finished”. So if something claiming to be from Sally lands in your inbox asking you to sign in somewhere, it is not from Sally. The only address here is hello@sallydoesdata.com, and it only ever replies to you.

A link that asks you to sign in

Every link on this page that points into your library will send you to the sign-in screen first if you are signed out, and then take you straight on to the page you were after. That is Sally being tidy, not a broken link.

Try things without an account

Three free tools need nothing at all: an EXIF viewer for seeing a photo’s hidden notes, a duplicate photo finder, and a digital estate checklist.

Where the limits are written down

Sally is young, US-only for now, and honest about it. The full list of what is not built yet lives on the questions and answers page — worth a glance before you conclude something is broken, because occasionally it was simply never there.