What Creel does, and what it does it with.

Only photos on the water you fish get classified

Creel only classifies photos taken on the water you fish. The rest of your library stays out of it, so the log is accurate from the moment the scan finishes.

Creel reads the library in one pass, with a model that runs on your phone, trained for one task: find the fish, name the species. No photo of yours is sent away to be looked at. A photo with two fish in it becomes two catches, not one. Photos taken at the house or the ramp never enter the log, because you drew those zones. What is left is grouped into the trips it came from — species, date, location, the lake, and the weather at that hour.

The first scan happens inside onboarding, not after it. Pick your lakes, set how strong conditions have to be before Creel tells you, and run the first scan — six steps and a ready screen.

Requires Location Services to be on for your camera: Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services › Camera, set to While Using the App, with Precise Location on. A photo without it never reaches the scan.

Measure the fish from the photo

On an iPhone Pro the shot carries its own depth data from the depth sensor, and Creel reads the length from it. No board, no ruler, no ball, and nothing to set up before the fish goes back.

Photos without depth go to a short list you fill in by hand. Enter a length and Creel estimates weight from a curve fitted for 14 species; others use a general freshwater curve.

Uses the depth sensor on iPhone 12 Pro and later.

Seconds from fish to log

Press the Action Button, or tap Creel from the Lock Screen or Control Center, and the photo is taken and logged with the weather, pressure, water and air temperature, wind and time filled in. Nothing to type on the boat, and nothing forgotten by the time you are home. Or tell Siri you caught one.

A trip that logs itself

Route, weather, water and every catch, recorded while you fish. One tap on the watch marks a spot. The write-up is waiting when you get home.

Trips can start themselves when you reach the water, if you let them, and a planner scores a day ahead by lake and spot. A running trip shows in the Dynamic Island.

Find the seasonal hotspots

Find the seasonal hotspots on the water you fish. Every catch on the map, filtered by species or by this month across every year, with a heat overlay for where they cluster, so you know which parts of your lake produce in which season.

Name a spot and set how far from it a catch still counts, 50 m to 2 km. Lakes have real shorelines from OpenStreetMap; the five Great Lakes carry their official boundaries.

Where to start tomorrow

Creel reads tomorrow's forecast against every spot where you have caught fish, and names the one that fits: air temperature, pressure, sky conditions and the fish you caught there before.

The card appears only when conditions support a spot. On a day they do not, there is no card.

A species guide that adapts to your water

It marks the season and the temperature band your lake is in right now, and what to throw for your target species while it is there.

Coaching that knows your water

Every day Creel reads the conditions, the season and your own catch record, and writes a short note on what to try: the hours, the depth, the pattern you keep almost getting right. It gets specific once it has ten of your fish to work from. It runs on your device.

Private Cloud Coaching, off unless you turn it on. Switch it on in Settings for a fuller tip, produced with Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Leave it off and every tip is written on your iPhone.

Requires an iPhone with Apple Intelligence. When the model is unavailable the card is blank.

Search every catch

Search every catch by species, lake, spot, date, length or notes. Find the August fish, the 30-inchers, the one spot that keeps producing. Find what worked, where, and take the answer on your next trip.

A record book keeps lifetime totals, a personal best per species, and this season against last.

Lake water temperature across the year

See what your lake's water temperature does across the year, modelled on your iPhone from the local weather record. Log a reading from the boat and the curve moves to match it.

Water temperatures you log shift the model's estimate for that lake.

One score for right now

One score for right now, and the week ahead as dawn, morning, midday, afternoon and dusk.

The score runs from 0 to 100. It reads the conditions; it doesn't predict a catch. Creel scores 41 freshwater species, each against its own preferences. Water temperature, time of day, wind and cloud move it most. Moon phase and pressure barely count, on purpose: solunar tables failed to predict catches in a 2023 study, and a few feet of depth changes the pressure on a fish more than a weather front does.

After ten catches logged with weather, each condition bends toward the conditions your fish came in. The weights stay fixed. Bite alerts fire at the threshold you set, with a daily cap and quiet hours. Today's score sits on your home screen, lock screen and StandBy.