Photos only on weekends and special days
Scrolling back through last year’s photos left me feeling a little hollow.
My daughter was moving up a grade in April, so I was going back through the year to see what we’d done. A few thousand photos had piled up. I was thinking we really did a lot this year — and then something pulled me up short.
The photos only lined up on weekends and special days. Sports day, birthdays, trips to see family, holidays. Dozens of shots from each. But the weekdays in between ran on and on without a single photo.
I tried to remember one of them. An ordinary Tuesday last autumn. I’d stepped away from work to pick my daughter up from daycare, and we’d walked home hand in hand. She would have been grinning, telling me everything that had happened that day. But I couldn’t remember a word of what we said on that walk. It wasn’t so much that I had no photo — it was that without one, a day could disappear this cleanly.
The days we spent the most time together were the ones least likely to be there. My camera roll wasn’t a record of them growing up. It was a record of our events.
1,095 photos, and I never look back
There’s the opposite problem too: too many photos. Or rather, both happen to the same person — both happen to me.
Three photos a day is 1,095 in a year. With two or three kids, more. That should be more than enough — and yet almost nobody has gone back through last year’s photos from the beginning.
Twenty near-identical faces in a row, and you can’t tell which one was the day’s best. The scrolling never ends. Opening it starts to feel like work, and I’ll go through it properly later carries you to the end of another year.
Days with no photos, and days with too many to look at. They seem like opposites, but the root is the same. I never decided, on the day itself, which photo would let me remember it. What you plan to deal with later, you usually don’t.
If sorting the photos themselves is where you’re stuck, Too many photos of my kids to sort walks through the steps.
The days you shoot a lot, and the days you don’t
our365 asks for one thing: choose one photo — the best of today.
On a day you took a lot, just pick one. You don’t have to delete the rest or organize anything. Your camera roll stays exactly as it is. You only decide “this was the best one today” and keep it.
On a day you took none, it becomes a reason to take one. You don’t have to wait for something special to happen. A face turned sideways at dinner, a hand helping out in the kitchen — anything that brings the day back is enough.
Once choosing one a day became a habit, the ordinary hours started to stay: working through homework, playing in the yard, sitting down to dinner together. My kids have got into it, too. “Take this one today.”
A year of that leaves 365 photos. And 365 — each one the best of its day — is few enough to look through from start to finish.
Choosing is remembering
Something happened while I was building this that I hadn’t expected.
At night, on a day I’d taken a lot, I’d compare a few and think about which one was most like today. In those few minutes, I’d go back through the day again. Oh — when I took this, she said that thing.
Taking a photo is just recording. Choosing one turned out to be retracing a memory.
That’s why our365 has no AI that picks the best shot for you. It would certainly save effort. No going through frame by frame, sorting out the ones where someone looked away or blinked. But that effort is the part I most wanted to keep. A photo chosen for you and a photo you chose are the same image file, yet a year later they don’t weigh the same.
Too important to hand over
Your photos stay on your iPhone and in your iCloud. They never reach our servers. No ads, no tracking.
Handing your children’s photos to someone else is unsettling. And lately there’s the added worry of your photos ending up as training data. I wanted to build something that people who feel the same way could use without that worry. That’s the honest reason.
Of course, sharing with family will eventually mean we need servers of our own. But the way it works today will stay as it is. That’s a promise.
Open it a year from now
A year from now, your camera roll will have grown by a few thousand photos. How many of them will you actually look at?
365, you can look at. Not just the days something happened — the days nothing did are there too.
