A new memory for your digital life

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Atlas Informatics is a startup in Seattle with an audacious goal to redefine search as we know it. Atlas Recall, the company’s first product, gives you a searchable photographic memory that helps you find everything you have seen across all of your devices, apps and cloud services.

This app remembers everything you do on your computer or on all of your computers, and automatically creates a searchable database that can peer into your browser history, your text messages and emails, and just about every major app you can think of, including the Microsoft suite, Slack, most Adobe, Google Docs and Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, and Twitter.

If you are thinking that you‘ve heard of this before you’re most likely thinking of universal search on Apple TV, Spotlight on the Mac and iOS or Google. But you have to remember that Google searches the public internet, Facebook tracks your private photos and friends, Outlook has your contacts, emails, and appointments, Spotlight knows your local files; Spotify has your music and playlists etc.

Atlas Recall is more like an amalgamation of these different services. While Google can search the indexed web and information from accounts you’ve signed into, it can’t look at documents stored locally on your laptop or iPhone. And although Spotlight and Universal Search trawl your apps, files and even the internet, they can’t pull up a page from your browsing history or make associations with other things you were looking at. Atlas Recall is unique in its ability to sort your results by other events at the same time.

Whit this app you can also look for something based on the time you opened it or what you were doing when you saw it. Search results are laid out visually, with screenshots of each listing organized by file type (images, documents, web pages, etc).

Recall is probably most useful for someone with more than one computer and more than one email address, as well as a job that requires them to be on the go a lot. The most handy feature is the ability to search your computer from an iPhone. So if you’re away from your computer and suddenly need to send someone everything you’ve written, emailed, and searched about say that’s easy to do.

Obviously there are some things you do on a computer that you might not want stored at all. For that reason, you have the option to pause Atlas for various increments of time and rescind its ability to remember what you’re doing.