Support
Grain is made by one person, and the same person reads the mail. If something is broken, confusing or missing, say so: every message is read, and most get a reply within a few days.
Get in touch
For a bug, a question, a licence problem or an idea, write to:
If you are reporting a problem, three things make it much easier to fix:
- Which version of Grain you are running (Settings › About), and whether it is on macOS, Windows, iPhone or iPad.
- What you did, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead.
- A screenshot, if the problem is something you can see.
Common questions
- Where are my files?
- In your own folders. A store is a folder on your disk (Documents/Grain by default), and Grain indexes what it finds there. It never moves, renames or deletes a file: removing a grain from the canvas leaves the file where it was, and “Delete file” moves it to the Bin rather than erasing it.
- Can I use a store on more than one computer?
- Yes. Keep the store in a folder your sync service already handles (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive or Box; Settings › Locations lists the ones on your machine). On the other machine, the New store dialog lists it under “Not yet on this device”, and Add opens it with its tags, notes and canvas intact.
- What can Grain import?
- Images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, TIFF, BMP, AVIF, SVG), audio (MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A, AIFF), movies (MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV), documents (PDF, EPUB, DOCX), fonts (TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2), 3D models (glTF, GLB, USDZ, OBJ, FBX, PLY, SPZ) and markdown notes, dropped in or saved into a watched folder. Pasting a web address imports what it points at: an image, a YouTube or Vimeo video, a post from a supported site, or a link card for any other page.
- How do updates work?
- On macOS and Windows the app checks once per launch and offers the update when there is one; Check for updates… in the Grain menu asks by hand, and Settings › General turns the automatic check off. On iPhone and iPad, updates come through the App Store.
- I bought a licence. Where does the key go?
- Settings › Licence. The key is in the email Polar sent when you paid; if you have lost it, write to us from the address you bought with and we will find it. One licence activates on up to three of your own machines.
- What does the iPhone and iPad app cost?
- Nothing. Grain for iPhone and iPad is free with no limit on stores, and it has no licence system at all.
- What does uninstalling leave behind?
- Your stores, untouched: they are ordinary folders and were never Grain’s to take. The index, thumbnails and settings live in the app’s own data folder (Library/Application Support/app.grainref on macOS, AppData/Roaming/app.grainref on Windows), which you can delete once the app is gone.