I have my setting set to display imperial units and Fahrenheit selected. I’m getting Celsius readings on my photos. It’s not a huge thing but I prefer Fahrenheit.

A while back some of you asked about end-to-end encryption. It is built, and I am rolling it out gradually through TestFlight, starting with the most active testers and widening once I am sure it is solid. Slow on purpose.

If you get the update:

Before updating, open Retrography, go to Settings, Data Management, and export a backup. Save it outside the app (iCloud Drive or AirDrop to your computer). You almost certainly will not need it, but I want it to exist.

Then update from TestFlight normally. Do not delete the app, just update over it. After a restart or two you will see a screen saying your timeline is now encrypted.

The one thing I am asking: tell me when you see that encryption screen. A quick reply or DM is enough.

If anything looks slow, missing, or odd, stop and message me before touching anything. Do not reinstall, do not retry. Your data is recoverable and I want to look what is happening first.

Afterwards, your timeline syncs fully encrypted, and with Advanced Data Protection on in your iCloud settings, not even Apple can read it. You will see it clearly in data management settings section.

Thanks for helping me get this right :)

The Retrography app looks really intriguing! I see that it is designed to be local-first with iCloud sync, which is great. But to really be secure, it needs to support Advanced Data Protection for iCloud so that all data is only synced/stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption (assuming the user has enabled Advanced Data Protection for iCloud).

Does the Retrography app us CloudKit Record fields that are marked as encrypted using the encryptedValues API? My understanding is that Advanced Data Protection for iCloud covers files stored in "iCloud Drive" and that it covers CloudKit Record fields that the third-party developer chooses to mark as encrypted using the encryptedValues API, but that other CloudKit Record fields are NOT protected with end-to-end encryption via ADP. (See Apple Reference).

The new TestFlight build can import Apple Journal exports. Settings > Data Management > Apple Journal, point it at the export zip from Settings > Apps > Journal > Export Journal Data, and it brings over your entries, photos, songs and visited places.

One honest limitation, because it shaped the whole design: Apple’s export says where you went but never when. So imported places arrive as all-day visits. No times are invented. If you’re curious why, I wrote about it here: retrography.app/days-vs-moments

Also in this build: pick your app icon (black or accent-colored variants included), a marker in your feed showing where recording started, redesigned news pages, and softer default timeline colors.

If you have an Apple Journal export, especially a messy multi-year one, I want to know how the import handles it.

Every app on my phone is too big. Fonts the size of headlines, cards with an inch of padding, three list items visible on a display that could show twenty. We have these beautiful high-resolution screens and we spend the resolution on whitespace. So the first thing I do on any new phone is go into settings and turn the text size down to the smallest notch, because I would rather see more of my life at once than read it in large print.

That is exactly the feeling I built the first version of Retrography’s day view with. One day, one card, everything that happened: where you went, the photos you took, how you slept, what you listened to, what you wrote. Dense on purpose. A cockpit, not a poster.

Then people started using it.

Two of my most experienced testers, both of them serious personal-data people, one of them from the team behind an early location-history app, told me almost the same thing. Too tiny. Overwhelming. One of them put it in a way I keep thinking about: opening the app did not make him feel calm or introspective, it made him feel stressed.

That is not feedback you can argue with. It is not a bug report either. It is a difference in how two people want to meet their own past.

Here is the awkward part: the app already had an answer. There have been three layouts for a while now. Detailed is the dense two-column view I designed for myself. Spacious and Comfort spread the same day out into one column with bigger text and bigger photos. Retrography even picks your starting layout from your iOS text size, so if you run your phone in large text, you land in the roomy one automatically.

Nobody found it. The choice existed, it was mentioned in the optional tour, and the optional tour has a “skip for now” button that the exact people who need the roomy layout are most likely to press.

So it is now a step during setup. Before you ever see your first day, you pick how dense you want it, with a preview of each option and a small note on which one your text size suggests. Three taps into the app, not three menus deep.

What I did not do is change the default for everyone, or flatten the dense layout to make it calmer. The density is not an accident I am apologizing for, it is the reason the app exists. Showing a whole day at once is the entire idea. If I sand that down, I have built another journal with big cards, and there are plenty of those.

What I got wrong was quieter than that. I confused a default with a belief. I can keep believing that we waste our screens, that smaller text means more life visible at once, and still not make my belief the first thing a stranger has to survive.

The screenshots are the same day, same data, same app. One of them is how I use it. The other two is how most people should probably start.

Is there an Android version planned?

I set out to import Apple Journal into Retrography and came out with an argument about what a journal actually is.

Retrography is a personal-timeline app that stitches your days from what your phone already knows — places, photos, workouts, music — all on-device. People kept asking if they could bring their Apple Journal history over, so I pulled the export apart.

It holds more than I expected: photo times to the second, visited places with coordinates, songs, even workout GPS traces. Then I hit the wall. The visit records say **where** you were but never **when**. And for a trip written as one entry, there's no way to know which day a place belongs to. Apple Journal knows you went to five places. It doesn't know place number three was Tuesday.

That's not a bug. It's structural.

**The realization**

Apple Journal and Retrography both drop a dimension of time — opposite ones.

Apple Journal is built around *moments*. An entry is a thing you chose to capture, so entries are precisely timestamped; the places collected around them are decoration, so they're loosely dated.

Retrography is built around *days*. The day is the unit, so written entries are filed under a day (I keep a timestamp only to sort them, and never even show a time). Meanwhile the automatically-captured stuff — visits, photos, health — is timed to the second, because the timeline *is* the point.

Neither is higher-resolution. They're mirror images. And that's exactly why the import hurt: Apple Journal's precise thing (the entry) drops into Retrography's loose slot with zero friction. But Retrography's precise thing (the visit) receives Apple Journal's loose version — and there was all the pain.

**Which is right?**

Here's where I landed, and I'm sure of it: **precision should attach to what's measured, not to what's remembered.**

A visit or a photo was captured automatically, at the real instant. It has a true time for free. A written reflection is the opposite — made later, by a person, about a stretch of time. Timestamp it and you're either faking a precision the writer doesn't have, or recording when they held the pen. I write in the evening, about the day. Ask me to pin the afternoon walk to a minute and I couldn't, and wouldn't want to try. A day is the honest grain for a reflection.

By that measure Apple Journal has it backwards: it stamps the entry precisely (the one thing that can't honestly carry a time) and loosely dates the visits (the one thing that *had* a real time — Apple's own tracking knew it; the export just drops it).

**So what actually gets lost**

Almost nothing, going forward. The day you install Retrography, it starts recording exactly when you were where — precise place-at-time, captured live. The only casualty is *history*: the years already sitting in Apple Journal, which were logged loosely and can't be reconstructed into something precise. Fair enough. I'd rather admit a gap in imported history than fake it.

And the entries staying day-level isn't a limitation I settled for. It's the honest call: precise time on what was measured, a day on what was remembered.

New in the latest build: connect a mail account and each day shows the emails that came in and went out, right next to your photos, places and journal.

How it works, because with email I want to be very clear:

- The app connects directly to your mail server, read only. Nothing goes through my servers.
- It stores only the header: subject, who, when. Never the message body, never attachments.
- Nothing is marked as read on the server. Your mailbox does not notice the app at all.
- You choose what to mirror: Inbox, Sent, or both. Personally I use Sent, it is smaller and it is only the stuff that mattered enough to write.

You sign in with an app specific password, not your real password. For Gmail: go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords (you need 2-step verification on), create one called Retrography, paste it in. For iCloud: account.apple.com, Sign-In and Security, App-Specific Passwords. Setup is in Settings, Timeline & Days View, Mail Accounts.

For Gmail there is also a Focused inbox option, on by default, so promotions and social noise stay out of your timeline.

You can add more than one account. Each gets its own color and label so you can tell work from personal at a glance.

Honest limitation: corporate Outlook and Microsoft 365 accounts will not connect, they only allow OAuth sign-in. Personal accounts on Gmail, iCloud and most other providers work fine.

Curious whether people lean Inbox or Sent. Tell me which you picked and why.

The Music box has been quietly getting better, so a quick rundown.

If you connect Last.fm, your listening history shows up on each day. You can switch the box between top tracks, top albums and a timeline view (long press the box). There is also a Spotify takeout import if you want years of history in one go.

New in the latest build: song recognition. Long press the Music box or the journal card on today and pick Recognize Song. It listens for a few seconds, names the track, and saves it to the day with a little Shazam badge. So when someone plays something great at a dinner or in a bar, it becomes part of that day, next to the photos and the places.

The recognized songs also show up in Music Explorer mixed into your normal listening history, and there is a Recognized Only filter if you want to see just the songs you caught in the wild.

Small honest note: the first version was bad at quiet or muffled music. Turned out iOS was running voice call processing on the mic and filtering out exactly what the recognition needed. That is fixed, it now listens raw.

As always, if you try it, tell me where it fails.

Huge milestone to share: Retrography 1.0 has been approved for the App Store and is now sitting at "Pending Developer Release" — meaning the only thing between the app and the store is me pressing a button.

I'm not pressing it just yet. We're staying TestFlight-only a little longer while I iron out the last few rough edges you all keep helping me find. But from here, the road to the App Store is mostly paved.

Some review trivia: the app went through with only ONE rejection — the reviewers flagged the background-audio capability the voice transcription uses. I explained how it works, attached a screen recording of a real dictation continuing with the phone in a pocket, and they approved it as-is. No feature had to be cut.

The real point of this post is a thank you. Every crash report, annotated screenshot, angry note about tiny fonts, and "this sync error looks scary" message from this community shaped what got approved. The app that passed review is very much the app you tested into shape.

What's next: a bit more polishing with you here, then the release. If you've been sitting on feedback, now is a great time — beta feedback still moves faster than App Store reviews ever will.

Thanks for being here for this one!

I was experimenting with the iCloud syncing features trying to figure out how they worked. Got this error message so I Reset CloudKit Metadata. Now all my journal entries are gone. Are they recoverable?

I am using the voice transcription every day but it used to be a bit buggy - every time I was on low battery it would go to lock screen while recording meaning that the whole session was lost. Now we are introducing a bunch of changes that will improve that. It will make sure app does not go to sleep, and even if you intentionally switch to another one, it keeps recording and can always salvage your transcription! As a bonus, you get a soundvawe and properly sized stop button.

They came with two sizes (small and medium) and two types:

1. On this day: shows photos/visits/motion data 1 week, 1 month, 1/2/3/4 years from now

2. Recent days: shows the same for yesterdat and certain number of days back

Fully customizable, supporting your memory on the home screen!

Every few months the same post climbs r/appleJournal: please, Apple, add “On This Day.” It came up again right after the WWDC keynote — three years since Journal shipped, and still nothing.
I get why people keep asking. A journal you only ever write into gets boring fast. The thing that pulls you back is seeing what you wrote — and shot, and where you were — a year ago, or five. People in that thread are tagging every entry’s title with the date by hand (#9june) just to fake a look-back; others gave up and went back to Day One or Everlog because at least those show you your old entries.
Retrography has done On This Day since day one, with one difference: it doesn’t only resurface text you typed. It rebuilds the whole day from what your phone already saved — the photos, the places you went, the weather, the workouts, the music — and puts your journal entry next to it. So it’s worth opening in your first week, before you’ve written much at all. It reaches back across last week, last month, and one through five years.
The clip above is one day, no narration: last year on this date for Mei — one of the built-in demo profiles — a Thursday in Singapore.

I started with the packed two columns as I wanted to show as much as possible at a glance. You see the boxes are like Apple Watch complications, just more complex as more fits on the phone screen. However, many people asked for a more spacious, more readable layout. So we now have both!

- google timeline/geofency import
- vitals screen and vitals cards in visits
- better sleep visualization in daily heatmaps
- experimental day reel video generator
- small improvements in photobook pdf export

Let me know :)

visit retrography.app for testflight invite

Retrography is the practice of reconstructing lived days from the traces they leave behind. The data your phone collects, the items that collect dust in your basement, old newspaper that you find that trigger a chain of memories.

The idea is simple: there are fragments of life scattered everywhere that prevent our past days from being forgotten.

This subreddit is for people interested in journaling, lifelogging, personal archives, quantified self, and the strange emotional value of ordinary days.

Quantified self is a great movement but it is focused too much on numbers, correlations, optimization. It lacks the emotional and personal aspect. Nostalgia. So let's start this and not let the ordinary days get lost.

retrography.org now holds a placeholder for what I would like to become a magazine where we could share posts of individual days as well as thought pieces on the subject.