If I open Photos right now, it helpfully informs me that I have 37,533 photos tucked away inside. Thirty-seven thousand, five hundred and thirty-three. That’s a lot of photos. And there will almost certainly be more by the time you read this.
I doubt I’m alone. A key advantage of owning an iPhone is that you always have a great camera on you. The downside is that you… always have a great camera on you. Which means we all take so many photos that most become ephemeral – mere glimpses of moments we barely remember. And while we can flag favorites or let Apple’s automated Memories feature surface highlights, the idea of actually managing such a vast collection can feel overwhelming.
That’s where a third-party app, also called Memories, comes in. Memories: Relive Your Photos (free + $2/£2) is a simple concept that works beautifully. It rifles through your entire photo library in seconds, and then presents a grid of every photo it can find that was taken on today’s date throughout the years.
It’s a fantastic way to revisit forgotten moments that Apple’s algorithms miss. But there’s a practical side too. When you tap an image, it displays in full screen, with buttons to mark the picture as a favorite or delete it. Spend a few minutes each day reviewing a small batch of snaps and, over time, you’ll gradually tidy your entire library – without the usual sense of dread. And if you want to jump to a different date, you can pull the screen up and down to move through the calendar, or use the menu at the top to visit a specific day.
Back in the day
Fastbackward (free + $2/£2) offers a similar idea with its own unique spin. It adds options to hide screenshots and change the sort order of photos. The full-size view also adds metadata, including maps for geotagged images, and you can press a button to show a random memory. That said, you can’t jump to a specific date, and the app feels less immediate than Memories, since its main screen mimics the Years view in Apple Photos. That means extra taps to reach the good stuff. Maybe we’ll get a simpler grid in a future update.
Still, the very existence of these apps is telling. You’d think Apple would have built something like this into Photos by now. Instead, it tries to be clever with algorithmic collections and natural-language search. But these are scattershot and sluggish when what many of us want is something methodical and swift.
Thankfully, then, the App Store exists, packed full of apps by enterprising creators filling the gaps. And that means I at least now have a fighting chance of whittling down my photo mountain rather than pretending it doesn’t exist and hiding it behind a bunch of collections that an Apple algorithm dreamt up.