Revisit your digital past with these photo memory apps
5 min read 21 Jun 2016, 08:45 PM ISTDo you remember what you did last summer? Now you can relive your past, one photograph at a time, with these apps
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Take a deep breath and try to recollect what you did last year—which flower you photographed, how a mundane Saturday became beautiful because you sighted a sparrow, or that dessert you ate at the restaurant whose name you don’t recall. Now you can relive your past, one photograph at a time, with these apps.
TIMEHOP
Timehop.com
Free on iTunes and Google Play
Delve into digital nostalgia with Timehop, which shows you what you were doing this day, exactly a year ago. Once you’ve downloaded the app and connected it to your social networks, Timehop plods through your past photos, status updates, tweets, check-ins and posts. Every morning, you wake up to a new photograph or memory from a year ago that you can also share on your social networks.
Windows Phone users can also try the Time Travel ! app, which is the same, though not so sleekly designed.
COLLECT
Thelenslab.com
₹ 133 on iTunes
Collect is about recording one moment every day. So you feed it one photo of yourself, your children, your garden, pet, anything really, daily. You can have multiple folders, but can only upload one photo per folder. The app allows you to include a detailed note along with the photograph and save it with tags. You can import a photo from your camera roll or take it from within the app. A month later, it creates an automatic, hi-resolution collage of those 30 days, one that you can share with friends and family.
Automatic backup to iCloud is available, but costs ₹ 190 extra.
MEMOIR
Yourmemoir.com
Free on iTunes
Memoir displays your earlier photos when you revisit the same place or meet the same friend. It almost seems serendipitous, though it uses the data you have collected through your smartphone—when you click a photo, check in at a restaurant or update your social network. Once you’ve downloaded it, you connect Memoir to your phone and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Dropbox, and then let it do its job.
Memoir tracks the photos on your phone, connected social networks, status updates as well as location check-ins and then notifies you about these old memories on the basis of where you are, what you’re doing or who you’re with. If you’re having a dosa, for example, it might tell you the last time you had one, and who you were with at that time. Or show photos of the same hotel you were at years ago, or the people you were with. You can annotate the old memories by adding new ones—like adding a new photograph with a note.
FLASHGAP
Flashgap.com
Free on Google Play and iTunes
Attending a party and want to see it from every angle? Ask your friends to download Flashgap. Once everyone has created a profile, you can create a shared photo album in which you can all upload photographs using the app. No one will be able to see, modify or delete the uploaded photos while the party is on. As soon as you take a photograph, it will show in the app for 3 seconds before disappearing. All this “evidence" becomes visible in the app at noon the following day, when you’re probably dealing with the hangover of the night before. Once the shared album is available, you and your friends can chat about the evening, relive the moments, laugh out loud at all the unfiltered visual documentary you’ve collected, comment on photographs, even delete the ones you don’t like.
GOOGLE PHOTOS
Photos.google.com
Free on Google Play, iTunes and Web
In August, Google Photos rolled out a walk-down-memory-lane feature. Now it’s reached a phase where it automatically feeds you enhanced photographs, collages from the past, and videos of a day from your past. All the images come as cards within the Google Photos app and list the people and places you’ve visited. You can choose to share through email or on social network, or show it to the person next to you.
ON THIS DAY
Facebook.com/onthisday
Free on Facebook
Built by Facebook, On This Day sends notifications to your Facebook timeline about what you were up to on a specific day, a year or a few years ago. Memories include posts, other posts you’re tagged in, major life events or when you became friends with someone on Facebook.
Had a break-up and don’t want to see the memories with your ex? You can control that by going to the app page. Click on Preferences, choose the Edit option next to the People tag and enter the name of the person whose memory you don’t want to see. The app also lets you filter by date—which days you don’t want to be reminded of and which ones you wouldn’t mind.
MOMENTS
Momentsapp.com
Free on Android and iTunes
Imagine, you and your friends go for a brunch and each of you ends up clicking a lot of pictures through the day, with multiple devices and smartphones. At the end of the day, when you go home, you want the pictures that your friends have clicked of you on their smartphones. Instead of asking them individually, you can download and install Moments.
This app automatically groups your photos with the people who are in them, either by event or day. So, for example, if you went to a wedding and all of you clicked pictures, Moments will make a Wedding folder for you to share, suggesting the friends you should share it with. All you need to do is add some photos the app might have missed and send those to your friends. It will work the same way for your friends too. Once you see all the photos taken by everyone, you can tap on the ones you want to save on your phone. Your friends need to have the app to be able to share and download too.
FOREVERY
Forevery.com
Free on iTunes
Download Forevery to automatically organize your photos on the basis of the things you care about, including broader themes likes emotions and ideas (happy, vibrant, idyllic) as well as people, faces, places, things and time. The app automatically applies more than 11,000-plus tags for objects, ideas, themes, locations and feelings to your photos. If that’s not enough, you can personalize the app by training it to recognize custom tags for the pictures you take. Be it “white cats" or “samosas", once you tell the app that’s the photo, it’ll remember and tag new photos of cats and samosas. So sit back and let Forevery create photo stories of your past life. You can share them online or just view them for your own pleasure. The app builders are working on an Android version too.
8TORY
8tory.com
Free on Google Play
Want a nostalgia overload? 8tory plays out your digital past by automatically making Then+Now pictures, helping you relive what you were doing on the same day a year or two ago, shows old photos of the same place when you revisit it, and shares memories common to you both when you meet a friend.
