Same place, different years
One city, every year you spent time there. Only places you returned to, with consecutive days grouped into a single visit.
Your days, across the years
What was this day
What was this day
like a year ago?
LayerYear is a personal journal that places your memories from different years side by side, aligned by date. Write about today, then look back through your photos across the years.
The main screens
Keep today.
See every year at once.
Your records stack up along a single axis: the date. The line you write today will be waiting for you on this day next year.
Timeline
The same date,
year after year
From 2021 to today, the same date stacks up year by year. Compare photo counts, the countries and cities you were in, the temperature and your notes — all at a glance.
- Scroll up and down for years, left and right for dates
- Jump to the nearest date in years with nothing recorded
- Change the zoom to fit more years on screen
Today
Keep a little of today
A mood, a hashtag, a note attached to a photo. Every entry adds one more record, and today's timeline threads them together in the order they happened.
- Write notes, moods and tags on one screen
- Sorted automatically by each photo's capture time
- Small moments add up to a day
Map of the day
The day's route,
drawn on a map
With location access, LayerYear draws where you went that day. Your photos land in the places where you actually took them.
- Checks location at intervals to save battery
- Skips repeated records while you stay in one place
- Notes still work without granting location access
A day in detail
Open a past day
exactly as it was
Tap a day in the timeline and it unfolds hour by hour — the photos you took, grouped together, with whatever you wrote beneath them.
Bits & Bobs
Other ways
to open the past
You don't have to read your life in date order. Follow a place, a tag, or turn a stretch of time into a short film.
Gathered by tag
Every note under the same tag, in date order. A hobby, a recipe, a trip — each becomes one continuous thread.
Make a timeline reel
Watch your own movement trace itself across a map in a vertical video. Pick a span, render it, then save it to Photos or share it straight away.
Same place, different years
Let the city
gather your memories
Three trips to Taipei become three chapters on one screen. Choose a country instead and every city you moved through is folded into a single story.
- From the earliest day onward, piece by piece
- Consecutive days grouped into one visit
- Jump straight into the full record for any day
Gathered by tag
One tag,
many days
Notes are collected by the hashtags you gave them. Something built over several days, a place you keep returning to, a hobby you've kept up — each reads as one thread.
- Sort newest or oldest first
- Photo notes and written notes together
Timeline reel
The ground you covered,
as a short film
Choose a span of time and LayerYear renders a vertical video that races across the map. The countries, cities and distance are summed up on the final card.
Render it, save it,
share it
Rendered as a 1080×1920 video made for vertical screens. Save it to Photos or post it straight from the share sheet.
- Pick a span on a year-by-month grid, then fine-tune by day
- A world map drawn from boundary data bundled in the app
- A closing card with the countries and cities you visited
Privacy
Your records
stay in your iCloud
There is no LayerYear server. No sign-up, no login. Your records move between your own devices and your own iCloud account — and nowhere else.
No account, no server
There is nothing to sign up for. LayerYear uses the iCloud account already set up on your device, so no developer server holding your records exists in the first place.
Stored in your iCloud
Notes, moods, tags, locations and weather records are saved in the private database of your own iCloud account, and count against your own iCloud storage.
Photos are never uploaded
Photos from your library are read and displayed within the access you grant. The originals are never uploaded anywhere.
No ads, no analytics
No advertising SDKs, no third-party analytics. There is no path for your usage to be tracked and sent out.
Showing maps and looking up weather use outside services such as Apple Maps and Apple Weather, and a location may be sent to those services at that moment. Photo and location access are both optional — you can use notes alone without granting either.
Also
Your screen,
your language
11 languages
English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. The display language, holiday country and time zone are chosen separately.
Light and dark
Automatic, dark or light. Automatic is the default and follows whatever your device is set to.
Shall we add
one more layer to today?
A single line is enough. A year from now, that line will be waiting for you.
- iPhone
- iOS 26 or later · Free
- Mac
- macOS 26 or later · One week free, then a subscription