A place for everything...
Photos, videos, text messages, locations, chats, social media, and more. Timelinize unifies it all.
By adding all your data, Timelinize documents your family's life with more detail and privacy, and gives you a more complete view of your story, than standard photo library and journaling apps.
...and everything at home.
Most apps store your data "in the cloud" and out of your control. What if you lost access to your Google/Apple/Facebook accounts, or your phone? By bringing that data home to your own computer, Timelinize preserves a richer story than any one app or service can do alone.
Timelinize isn't a replacement for the apps and services you already use, so you don't need to disrupt your way of life. Instead, it "sits behind" what you already use to become the permanent private archive of your working copy from:
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With several projections for your data, it's easy to keep moments alive that would otherwise be forgotten, rotting on a hard drive in your closet... or in a bigcorp's cloud.
The images below show a real timeline with personal data, so the application was configured to obfuscate images, names, some locations, and other personal information. Your own timeline will appear normally.
Timeline
The timeline view semantically groups all your data into a single linear layout. Easily see what occurred on a specific day in the order it happened.
Conversations
Follow connections with people across all kinds of chats and messages. Combine conversations with people across platforms into one view.
Gallery
Browse through a rich display of photos and videos from photo libraries, messages sent and received, and other sources.
The ultimate personal archival suite
Flexible, high-speed imports
Add millions of data points to your timeline in a matter of minutes. You get full control over background jobs like imports, thumbnails, and embeddings.
Pictures come alive with motion
Timelinize supports playing "live photos" (or "motion photos") for photos taken on Apple, Google, and Samsung devices.
Entity-aware processing
Timelinize specializes in combining data from multiple sets and sources. It can identify people and other entities across data sources by their attributes. If a person or contact appears in multiple data sets, it will automatically merge them if possible. If not, you can easily merge entities with the click of a button.
Magically geo-locate data without coordinates
Because Timelinize is entity-aware, it can project data points onto a map even without coordinate data. If a geolocated point is known for an entity around the same time of others of that entity's data points, it will appear on the map.
Make your map pop
Customize the map to change its theme, layers, and even make it 3D.
See your hot spots at a glance
The heatmap shows where your data is concentrated. It smoothly blends as you zoom in and out.
Combine data sets
Customize what defines a duplicate item, and how to handle that, with a fine degree of control—perfect for merging separate, disparate data sets.
Unified conversations
An implicit conversation is discovered when a data source links items and entities with a "sent to" relation. You can easily view conversations between entities across modalities in a single scroll: chats, emails, messages, texts, and more.
Features for humans
Since I need this to function well for my own family, I have tried to give special attention to less-visible aspects of this application, such as:
Advanced location processor
Timelinize deduplicates, denoises, clusters, and simplifies location data for optimal preservation, with an algorithm that subjectively performs better than Google Maps Timeline.
CLI and HTTP API
For nerds like me: you can use Timelinize through its CLI, which mirrors all the functions of the HTTP API used by the frontend.
Semantic search
Search for pictures and messages by describing them, or find similar items to what you're viewing.
Thumbnails and transcoding
All items are stored verbatim, then thumbnails are generated for all images and video media, which are stored separately. Your original data is not modified.
Flexible schema
The database schema has been meticulously designed and refined to be as adaptable as possible.
A timeline to the future
Timelinize will continue to develop and evolve. In the future, I anticipate the following capabilities:
Create using your timeline
Annotate your timeline, write rich stories with live embeddings from your timeline data, or make physical media like photo books (but with more than just photos!).
Augment with public data
Add context to your timeline with additional public timelines which have weather, local/regional news, and global events.
Secure data sharing
Securely and privately share parts of your timeline with trusted friends and family members, directly from your computer to theirs.
Mobile apps and first-class sync
Right now, Timelinize sits "behind" the apps and platforms you already use. But in the future, you could sync data directly to your timeline as it is originated.
Meet your personal timeline
Collect your data from various sources. Import it with a few clicks. Within minutes, explore millions of your data points in several intuitive ways.
Self-contained, portable repositories
Imported data is copied into your timeline folder, ensuring long-term stability and integrity. Timelines are portable—you can copy them or move them to other devices and computers.
No proprietary storage scheme
Your timeline is simply a folder on disk containing a SQLite database alongside your data files. You can freely explore it with other tooling, so you're not locked into Timelinize.
Works with data you're already generating
Unlike writing a journal, you don't have to take extra time to create content. You're already making the data your timeline can display! And it doesn't replace your current workflow or apps.