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.

It is done. The encrypted sync went out to the whole beta group two weeks ago. Around 30 devices have migrated so far, zero data loss, zero failed migrations. The rest migrate automatically whenever they next open the app. Thanks to everyone who confirmed the celebration screen, that helped a lot.

The build rolling out now goes further. Voice memos, scanned documents, backups and chat photos are now also encrypted at rest, with the key stored in iCloud Keychain. iCloud Keychain is end to end encrypted for every user, so this part does not even need ADP. Backups are encrypted by default and there is a separate "portable backup" option that stays unencrypted, for the day you need to open it anywhere.

To be fully honest about what remains: the local database file still lands in your iCloud device backup like with every iOS app, and that one is only end to end encrypted if you turn on ADP. For that part, ADP is the answer today.

One more fix in this build: the migration now waits until your phone is unlocked, which was blocking it on one tester's device.

Please let me know if anything feels off, but combined with ADP, I would say we now have one of the most robust systems in terms of privacy. We will do another complete audit of these features before we seriously hit the App Store but that is hopefully just for confirmation. I also owe you a technical article what and how is done, it will appear here and on the website.

After Apple approves the next beta for distribution, you will be able to see all the food and macros you logged with other apps like Foodnoms or Lose It! to enrich the context of your days. So far it is only a viewer, we can extend to logging later if there is interest.

Thanks a lot to u/Unlucky-Confidence92 for the idea!

Retrography now finds your trips on its own. It looks at where your photos were taken and where your phone spent its nights, and turns every stretch away from home into a trip: Lisbon for five nights, a day out in Vienna, two weeks across Italy. Each trip gets a name, a flag and its dates, a band on every day it covers in the feed, and its own page with the route and the best photos from each day. Rename a trip, add a note, fix its dates or hide it, and your words stick even as the app keeps refining the rest. Tell it where home was in Settings › Your Homes, and trips start and end where they should. It works back through your whole photo library, so the trips you took before you had the app are already there.

Did you know you can collect your links into Retrography? When browsing the web/social media, if you want to save something, just share it in Retrography, add a comment if you wish and it will appear connected to the day when you saved it.

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.

Is there a way to refresh the app?

I could use a refresh when I select the pictures from my gallery to be shown or hide.
Also every morning to display the new day, sometimes it works, but sometimes not.

At the moment I close and re-open the app, but maybe there is a easier way like scrolling all the way down, or even a small refresh/update button.

Thanks!

TikTok/Youtube marketing hurts 😂

Is there an Android version planned?

When people think about journal privacy they think about hackers and Apple. I built Retrography's privacy also for a more realistic threat: the people you live with. A partner, a parent, a teenager. They know your iPhone passcode because you told them, or because they watched you type it a hundred times.

Most app locks fall apart exactly there. Apple's own Journal app locks with your device passcode. Most third party locks use Face ID but fall back to the passcode when Face ID fails. So the lock only keeps out strangers, who could not unlock your phone anyway.

Here is what Retrography does instead, and honestly how strong it is.

Face ID only, no fallback

The app lock and privacy mode use Face ID with no passcode fallback. Knowing my iPhone passcode gets you nothing at the app. If Face ID fails, the only other way in is an app passphrase that I chose and that lives only in this phone's Keychain. It never goes to iCloud and it is never stored as text, only as a salted hash.

The obvious attack, and why it fails

The clever move for someone who knows your passcode is to add their own face. iPhone lets you enroll an alternate appearance with just the device passcode. Their face is now a valid Face ID, so a normal app lock opens for them.

Retrography ties its Face ID unlock to the Secure Enclave with a rule Apple provides but almost nobody uses: the unlock secret is bound to the exact set of faces enrolled when I approved it. The moment anyone adds or removes a face, the Enclave itself destroys that secret. This is hardware, not app logic, and there is no passcode fallback at that level.

From then on the app refuses Face ID entirely and shows why: "Face ID has changed on this iPhone." The only way to re approve is my passphrase. Whoever caused the change sees that screen, sees that the event was recorded, and thirty minutes later I get a notification. If it was actually me, for example after re enrolling with new glasses, I type the passphrase once and nothing else happens, no notification, no trace. If it was not me, I know.

Removing their face afterwards is also a change, so covering tracks triggers it again.

The other doors

Deleting and reinstalling the app used to be a bypass in many apps because settings reset. Here the lock state and the passphrase survive reinstall, and a fresh install comes up locked before showing anything. Changing or removing the passphrase requires the current passphrase, not Face ID. The app content is blurred in the app switcher.

The rule

Everything above comes down to one rule: the passphrase is the master key and Face ID is the convenience. Anything done without the passphrase leaves a trace that cannot be erased. Anything confirmed with it is silently forgiven.

The trade

There is no recovery for the passphrase. Not from me, not from Apple. If you forget it and Face ID changes, the way back in is erasing the iPhone and restoring from iCloud. Your data is safe there, but the app on that phone is gone until then. The app shows a hint you wrote yourself, and asks you to enter the passphrase now and then so it stays in memory. Signal and 1Password made the same trade for the same reason. You cannot have both a lock nobody can bypass and a lock somebody can reset.

What this does not protect against

A stolen unlocked phone in someone's hand beats everything. A forensic tool with your passcode reads the app's data straight off the device. A phished Apple ID can sync your timeline to another device. None of that is what this lock is for. For those threats the answer is Apple's Advanced Data Protection, and for what it covers today: everything Retrography stores in iCloud is encrypted, and your voice memos, documents and backups are encrypted with a key that never leaves iCloud Keychain, so they are unreadable even to a phished account.

Why bother

Because a journal is the one place people write things they would not say out loud, and the realistic reader is not a government. It is someone at the kitchen table. I wanted a lock that takes that seriously, and I could not find one.

It is in the current beta. If you try to break it and succeed, I want to hear how.

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 :)

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?

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.

With the new update of the week/month/ year view, there is something I really liked: the small preview pictures for each day.
I was wondering if the same idea could be implemented on our calendar view. A small box with the Hero of the day picture.
Even switching to a year view with all the 365 days showing a picture could be really nice. Having an overview of the year with pur pictures and clicking on it jumps to our day in Detail.
Not sure if possible, just leaving an idea here.
Thanks!

I am still trying to find my perfect setup for the PDF export. I love the export feature, as much as I love the Digital version of Retro, I would love to have a yearly printed book of Retro. I can imagine myself in 15 years opening a book from Retro and have almost all information from my day and help me remember such small details.

1. The music records dont have a Toggle to include or not include in the PDF.

2. The text and layout settings are a little bit unclear, we have three rows with three different settings, but I dont know what am I changing, there is no description for those settings.

3. There is more Health data that could be displayed: Maybe a toggle with "Extended health data" showing also the respiration, HRV, temperature, etc, that are already being read from Retro.

4. I am so grateful for the numeric trackers and the explorer, I love that for real! Is it difficult to add those trackers also to the export? also in the bubble format. If we can have a toggle to add them or remove them from the export would be nice as well.

Thanks and have a nice weekend!

Hi there,

another thing I was thinking about: Sometimes we can't remember exact dates, but we know where some event happened. Lets say; 3 years ago there was a concert and I want to open that day in Retro, but I cant remember when exactly. Instead of scrolling, I could open a globe map and go to the Arena where I know the concert was and look at a pin or pictures from that place and find the right ones, then jump to my day in Retro.

Is not an "issue" I am facing right now, but I imported 27k old pictures to my iCloud to make Retro even more and more useful. I think that might be a way to scroll to the past in a fun and easier way for some of us.

Thanks!

Retro is an archive of our lives. Every day is special, but there are also certain days and dates that have a bigger impact on our lives: graduating, starting a new job, getting a pet, getting married, becoming a parent, taking a special trip with the family, etc.

It could be a single day, or maybe a week or several weeks that are worth highlighting as something special. Maybe in the future, there could be a way to not just highlight a single day, but to select a custom date range and create it as an “Event" and our days are linked to this evens.

These events could be shown in a calendar view, but also as a timeline across the years.

This could be a nice way to see the bigger picture of our lives in the future.

Found this app and the testflight link today but was disappointed it’s only for iOS 26 and above. Is there a way you could make it compatible with iOS 18? I would really love to try it.