🧵 I built Stillkeep, a calm, private photo journal for iPhone. Photos and writing live together as Moments, grouped into life chapters called Eras. It's built with Native SwiftUI, CloudKit sync, zero tracking and is a sleek ~8 MB. 👉 stillkeep.app
🤔 The problem
I found I had thousands of photos on my phone. If I scrolled back far enough I could tell you what happened in most of them, but not always why it mattered. For example, who was there, what we'd been talking about, how that day actually felt.
I felt that the camera roll was keeping the picture and quietly losing the story. 📉
I tried fixing that with journaling apps, but most are built around text with photos bolted on. I found a similar issue with notes apps: I'd start a neat folder structure 📁, stop maintaining it a few weeks later, and the photos lived somewhere else entirely.
So I built Stillkeep: Journal & Diary, an iPhone app that keeps the photo and the story in the same place. ✨
🧩 The idea: Moments inside Eras
The whole app rests on two concepts:
🖼️ Moments
A Moment is a single memory: a few photos, some writing, or both. You can add:
- 👥 the people who were there
- 📍 the places involved
- 💭 a "vibe" for how it felt
- 🏷️ tags
Write as little or as much as you like. A photo with one line is a perfectly good Moment.
📚 Eras
An Era is a chapter of your life: a trip ✈️, a new job 💼, a baby's first year 👶, a house move 🏡, or just "this summer" ☀️.
Instead of one endless timeline, your journal becomes a shelf of chapters, each with its own cover.
I landed on Eras because that's how people actually remember things. Nobody thinks "March 14th". They think "back when we lived in that flat" or "the year I started running". 🏃
🌿 Making it calm
I wanted Stillkeep to feel like the opposite of a social feed:
- 🚫 No streaks
- 🚫 No nagging notifications
- 🚫 No likes
Inside an Era, Moments sit in a clean feed you can filter by photos, notes, people or places. Tap a photo (like one of your dog) and it fills the screen with nothing else in the way. 🐶
🔭 Reflect
This is the feature I'm proudest of. Pick any time range and Reflect gives you a quiet overview of the shape of that period, so you can step back and see how you're using the app and retaining your memories.
There's also Look Back 🕰️, which surfaces older Moments gently rather than ambushing you with "on this day" pop-ups.
📖 Export
When an Era is finished, you can export the whole thing as a PDF photobook, or share a single Moment as a Photocard. 💌
🛠️ Under the hood
This is dev.to, so here are the technical bits:
| 🦅 Language / UI | Native Swift + SwiftUI |
| 📱 Target | iOS 17.6+ |
| ☁️ Sync | CloudKit, in the user's own iCloud |
| 🔒 Tracking | None. No third-party analytics, no ad SDKs, no cross-app tracking |
| 📦 Binary size | ~8 MB |
🚀 Try it
If you've ever meant to keep a journal and bounced off a blank text page, I'd love for you to give it a go:
👋 Also by me
Onuri 🧠 is a private notes app for iPhone that automatically connects the people, places, dates and topics in your writing. No folders, no tags to maintain.
Onuri — Private Notes & Life Tracker for iPhone
Onuri is a private notes and life tracker for iPhone with smart filters, related entries, dark mode, automatic connections and private iCloud sync.
onuri.app
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