I've been working on this for about 10+ years, nights and weekends. It's been really slow going since I only have my own personal data to test it with.
I just don't love that my data is primarily stored on someone else's computer up in the cloud. I want my own local copy at least. And while I can download exports from my various accounts, I don't want them to just gather dust and rot on my hard drive.
So, Timelinize helps keep that data alive and relevant and in my control. I don't have as much worry if my cloud accounts go away. Hopefully you'll find it useful, and I hope we can collaborate.
(PS. I'm open to changing the name. Never really liked this one...)
For obvious reasons this has to be self hosted and managed. I'm not interested in creating surveillance software or technology.
It sounds extreme but whenever I have seen peoples obsidian set ups with heaps of manual and bidirectional linking I always thought that time is the one thing we should look at. If I look up some concept on wikipedia today, there is a higher chance of me looking up related concepts or working on something related to that around this time also.
I'm at least proposing that this be open source, self hostable and valuable to yourself.
Also, I know my threat model. Maybe you are James Bond though.
That is exactly what you would be doing though
It's interesting to read such a comment here. I see comments from people on this site frequently who work for Google, Facebook, OpenAI and other such companies where everyday software that doesn't respect users or their privacy is being worked on.
However, if I suggest doing similar data collection and analysis that they already do but in a way that is self hostable/governable and respects my privacy and threat model, it is bad?
I wish I could find it again.
https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
https://www.scribd.com/document/18361503/Eric-T-Freeman-The-...
Sounds in-scope so far. Long-term, perhaps, and maybe optional add-on features rather than built-in, but we'll see.
> I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I press.
That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself.
But hey, the vision is pretty similar. We are generating all sorts of data to document and understand our lives -- we don't even have to deliberately write a journal -- but we have no way of comprehending it. This app is an attempt to solve that.
I do see that. I think for that reason it would be cool to support a kind of extension system for arbitrary "collectors". And then solid filtering to filter data.
The vision is definitely similar. I am very pleasantly surprised to see your project. And I also like your ideas/roadmap on the website. I know you are building this for yourself/your family but I certainly would be open to contribute to it.
I mostly felt like Timelize was about being *behind* data-generating applications and showing and cross-referencing their data when reading the website.
I think the way is to do some sort of nextcloud extension that puts data into Timeline.
I also saw it tracks "documents" on the website but I didn't try it yet, and I would hope it can use external document sources that are already processing documents like paperless for example (which I am already using and liking)
That may be more realistic and in scope than how nextcloud actually supports entire orgs/organizational units.
So yes, Timelinize sits behind your current work flows. It's more of a resting place for your data (which you can still organize and curate -- more features to come in this regard), but I also can see why it might make sense to be one's primary photo library application, in the future, with more development.
As for document storage, this is still WIP, and the implementation could use more discussion to clarify the vision and specifics.
> That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself.
Think this can go quite far with just the browsing history & content of viewed webpages.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-sessions/...
This could even allow resetting the state of the computer back in time so you can pick up exactly where you left off, or undo away mistakes regardless of app, etc.
Definitely some privacy concerns but for a self ran open source thing I think it could be really cool
A couple thoughts & ideas:
- Given the sensitivity of the data, I would be rather scared to self-host this, unless it's a machine at home, behind a Wireguard/Tailscale setup. I would love to see this as an E2E-encrypted application, similarly to Ente.io.
- Could index and storage backend be decoupled, so that I can host my photos etc. elsewhere and, in particular, prevent data duplication? (For instance, if you already self-host Immich or Ente.io and you also set up backups, it'd be a waste to have Timelinize store a separate copy of the photos IMO.) I know, this is not entirely trivial to achieve but for viewing & interacting with different types of data there are already tons of specialized applications out there. Timelinized can't possibly replace all of them.
- Support for importing Polarsteps trips, and for importing Signal backups (e.g. via https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools ) would be nice!
> unless it's a machine at home,
This is, in fact, the intended model.
The problem with any other model, AFAIK, is that someone else has access to your data unless I implement an encrypted live database, like with homomorphic encryption, but even then, I'm sure at some places it would have to be decrypted in memory in places (like, transcoding videos or encoding images, for starters), and the physical owner of the machine will always have access to that.
I just don't think any other way of doing it is really feasible to truly preserve your privacy. I am likely wrong, but if so, I also imagine it's very tedious, nuanced, error-prone, and restrictive.
(Or maybe I'm just totally wrong!)
> - Could index and storage backend be decoupled, so that I can host my photos etc. elsewhere and, in particular, prevent data duplication?
I know this is contentious for some, but part of the point is to duplicate/copy your data into the timeline. It acts as a backup, and it ensures consistency, reliability, and availability.
Apps like PhotoStructure do what you describe -- and do a good job of indexing external content. I just think that's going to be hard to compel in Timelinize.
> Support for importing Polarsteps trips, and for importing Signal backups (e.g. via https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools ) would be nice!
Agreed! I played with Signal exports for a while but the format changed enough that it was difficult to rely on this as a data source. Especially since it's not just obvious what changes, it's encryption so it's kind of a black box.
That said, anyone is welcome to contribute more data sources. I will even have an import API at some point, so the data sources don't have to be compiled in. Other scripts or programs could push data to Timelinize.
Just to reiterate, one of the main goals of Timelinize is to have your data. It may mean some duplication, but I'm OK with that. Storage is getting cheap enough, and even if it's expensive, it's worth it.
> I just don't think any other way of doing it is really feasible to truly preserve your privacy. I am likely wrong, but if so, I also imagine it's very tedious, nuanced, error-prone, and restrictive.
It's certainly not easy but I wouldn't go as far as saying it requires homomorphic encryption. Have you had a look at what the Ente.io people do? Even though everything is E2E-encrypted, they have (purely local) facial recognition, which to me sounds an order of magnitude harder (compute-intensive) than building a chronological index/timeline. But maybe I'm missing something here, which isn't unlikely, given that I'm not the person who just spent a decade building this very cool tool.
> It acts as a backup, and it ensures consistency, reliability, and availability.
Hmmm, according to you[0],
> Timelinize is an archival tool, not a backup utility. Please back up your timeline(s) with a proper backup tool.
;)
I get your point, though, especially when it comes to reliability & availability. Maybe the deduplication needs to happen at a different level, e.g. at the level of the file system (ZFS etc.) or at least at the level of backups (i.e. have restic/borgbackup deduplicate identical files in the backed-up data).
Then again, I can't say I have not had wet dreams once or twice of a future where apps & their persistent data simply refer to user files through their content hashes, instead of hard-coding paths & URLs. (Prime example: Why don't m3u playlist files use hashes to become resistant against file renamings? Every music player already indexes all music files, anyway. Sigh.)
> Especially since it's not just obvious what changes, it's encryption so it's kind of a black box.
Wouldn't you rather diff the data after decrypting the archive?
> Just to reiterate, one of the main goals of Timelinize is to have your data. It may mean some duplication, but I'm OK with that. Storage is getting cheap enough, and even if it's expensive, it's worth it.
I suspect it will lead to duplication of pretty much all user data (i.e. original storage requirements × 2), at least if you're serious about your timeline. However, I see your point, it might very well be a tradeoff that's worth it.
But yes, I think the likes of what Ente is doing is interesting, though I don't know the technical details.
Data content hashes are pretty appealing too! But they have some drawbacks and I decided not to lean heavily on them in this application, at least for now.
In practice, I do a Takeout once or twice a year. (I recommend this even if not using Timelinize, so you can be sure to have your data.)
It should not add any costs except the storage for the takeout zip on drive.
Look at supported providers in rclone and you might find easy solutions for some hard sync problems: https://rclone.org/#providers
Yeah, that's the cost I'm talking about. It essentially amounts to paying an extra subscription to be able to download your data [on a regular basis].
I'm a big rclone fan btw :) I'm sure there's some future where we do something like this to automate Takeouts.
About 5-6 years ago, Timelinize actually used only the Google Photos API. It didn't even support imports from Takeout yet. The problem is the API strips photos of crucial metadata including location, and gives you nerfed versions of your data. Plus the rate limits were so unbearable, I eventually ripped this out.
But yeah, an app that runs on your phone would be a nice QoL improvement.
That's what I do. Though I don't then put them into any system. Yet.
To clarify, you don't grant access to Google Photos, you just do the Takeout from https://takeout.google.com to download your data first.
[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/timelinize/timelinize@v0.0.23/...
In the context of Timelinize, this is great! Outside of that, this sentence really drives home how much data Google could join on me -- a heavy Android/Chrome/Gmail/Maps w/ timeline user.
What are you planning with weather? Associating entities that have a known location with historical temp/forecast data?
"error": "opening database: pinging database file: invalid uri authority: D%5CMy%20Timeline%5Ctimeline.db_foreign_keys=on&_journal_mode=wal&_txlock=immediate&mode=rwc"
Thanks for making this, def will be digging in!
P.S. HPI has many existing exporters, so it might be helpful to extend Timelinize's capacity.
Timelinize's data sources are easily extensible so adding more shouldn't be too hard, HPI included.
Thank you!
In terms of Features, i'd like to see support for FindPenguins. A lot of interesting data (photos, videos, GPS coordinates, text) is already there.
FindPenguins is cool! I don't use it myself, but anyone is welcome to implement a data source for it.
So thank you so much, I now have another project to host on my home server, and a meaningful one.
>(PS. I'm open to changing the name. Never really liked this one...)
Timelinize is great, it explains what the product does
I'm curious about real-time data, or cron jobs, though. I love the idea of importing my data into this, but it would be nicer if I could set it up to automatically poll for new data somehow. Does Timelineize do something like that? I didn't see on the page.
Real-time/polling imports aren't yet supported, but that's not too difficult once we land on the right design for that feature.
I tinkered with a "drop zone" where you could designate a folder that, when you add files to it, Timelinize immediately imports it (then deletes the file from the drop zone).
But putting imports on a timer would be trivial.
Anything in ~/Inbox is "safe to delete" because it's guaranteed to have an off-site backup.
Presumably a fancy management app would queue (or symlink) the full directory structure into ~/Inbox (which would then behave as a "streaming cache")
~/Inbox would effectively be available (read only) on "all machines" and "for free" with near zero disk space until you start accessing or pulling down files.
I use Dropbox to manage ~/Sync (aka: active, not "dead" files).
"Outbox", "Inbox", and "Sync" have been the "collaboration names" that resonated the most with me (along with ~/Public if you're old enough, and ~/Documents for stuff that's currently purely local)
You might suggest to users the following use case. “If you want to create a Timelinize data store, but don’t feel that your own local systems are secure enough to safely hold a basket with a copy of every egg in your life, you might consider the following use case, which some of our customers implement. Once our twice a year, update the data store, but store it on an external disk. When the update is done, take the disk offline and keep it in a drawer or safe.”
Also
I always wondered how cool it would be if I could tell some Spotify-like system, “I’m 20 miles away from the lake, we are going to stay in the cabins a week, just like we did 10 years ago. Play me the exact same songs now that played at every turn back then.”
Also
For a name, how about: ChronEngine That name seems pretty free and clear from previous use, if you like it grab ChronEngine.com before some squatter does and thank me with a phone call, I would enjoy a quick chat with you.
Also
Your web page might benefit from a grid that lists all the input sources you accept, with hotlinks next to the names that give a pop-up quick summary of what that source is about, and maybe some color coding that shows something like “green = rock solid lately”, “yellow = some users reporting problems”, “red = they just updated their format, it’s broken, we are working on it”. You will/are facing challenges similar to Trillian, a chat client from the early 2000s that would try to maintain ongoing connection compatibility with multiple other chat clients such as AIM/ICQ/MSN. Also, the grid could have a “suggested source sets” filter that helped people find what 5 (for example) input sources they might select for their use style.
Oh and make a list of anybody that says they have done an elaborate something similar with Excel (like me and at least one other person in this thread) and maybe have a discussion with them some time, we/they might have some useful insights.
Let’s hear it for people on the opposite side of the “go fast and break things” coin! My first project took 16 years. My current one I started 28 years ago!
> You might suggest to users the following use case. “If you want to create a Timelinize data store, but don’t feel that your own local systems are secure enough to safely hold a basket with a copy of every egg in your life, you might consider the following use case, which some of our customers implement. Once our twice a year, update the data store, but store it on an external disk. When the update is done, take the disk offline and keep it in a drawer or safe.”
Sure, I like that.
> I always wondered how cool it would be if I could tell some Spotify-like system, “I’m 20 miles away from the lake, we are going to stay in the cabins a week, just like we did 10 years ago. Play me the exact same songs now that played at every turn back then.”
It's inevitable for an LLM and other tooling like personal assistants to be integrated to this thing, so yeah that sounds like a great use case.
> For a name, how about: ChronEngine That name seems pretty free and clear from previous use, if you like it grab ChronEngine.com before some squatter does and thank me with a phone call, I would enjoy a quick chat with you. ... Oh and make a list of anybody that says they have done an elaborate something similar with Excel (like me and at least one other person in this thread) and maybe have a discussion with them some time, we/they might have some useful insights.
Not bad actually; and sure, we can chat either way. Feel free to book a time at https://matt.chat.
> Your web page might benefit from a grid that lists all the input sources you accept, with hotlinks next to the names that give a pop-up quick summary of what that source is about, and maybe some color coding that shows something like “green = rock solid lately”, “yellow = some users reporting problems”, “red = they just updated their format, it’s broken, we are working on it”. You will/are facing challenges similar to Trillian, a chat client from the early 2000s that would try to maintain ongoing connection compatibility with multiple other chat clients such as AIM/ICQ/MSN. Also, the grid could have a “suggested source sets” filter that helped people find what 5 (for example) input sources they might select for their use style.
I LOVED Trillian, thanks or the nostalgia. Oh man, they're still alive: https://trillian.im/ (I love the icon...)
If you want to have collaboration on this, maybe think about splitting it into backend and frontends. With the backend being the storage, and it's import-mechanism, and the frontend being open for anyone to put their own view onto the data, and maybe work with them.
Maintaining personal data has demand here, but so far there is no real unified project catering to a broad range of services and different types of data. So there is a space to fill and a community to build IMHO.
Data sources are extensible, they basically just need to implement 2 methods: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/timelinize/timelinize@v0.0.24/...
> No generic format to build your own sources?
I'm designing an import API that will let any script or program push data to the timeline.
> Also, why the focus on a timeline?
Seemed to make the most sense.
> Not all personal data or tasks are time-related.
Probably true. Do you have examples of what you're thinking of?
> If you want to have collaboration on this, maybe think about splitting it into backend and frontends. With the backend being the storage, and it's import-mechanism, and the frontend being open for anyone to put their own view onto the data, and maybe work with them.
That's how it is right now; it's a client-server architecture. It has a CLI and a JSON API so you can build your own front-ends.
> Maintaining personal data has demand here, but so far there is no real unified project catering to a broad range of services and different types of data. So there is a space to fill and a community to build IMHO.
I agree, this is a huge void that needs to be filled!
Bookmarks, contacts, notes for example, they are usually not time-based but by context, category or whichever organization their usage demands at the moment. They can be time-based in a journal, but usually I do not remember websites or people by the time I encountered them, so I would not search them this way.
The other question is how personal is personal in this project? Are my IMDB-ratings valid data for this? My Ebook-collection? My Steam-account? Those are usually things I would not manage in a timeline or a map, but with different interfaces and features.
Contacts are already handled as first-class concepts in Timelinize, known as "entities". Entities don't have timestamps, but they have a name and attributes that can be anything, and the relationship between the entity and its attributes can be bounded by time.
Notes are also created and updated/changed at specific times.
> Are my IMDB-ratings valid data for this? My Ebook-collection? My Steam-account? Those are usually things I would not manage in a timeline or a map, but with different interfaces and features.
Could be, if you wanted to timeline those! (Like, when you rated a certain movie. Or when you got or read a certain book. Or when you got a new Steam game.)
I’m not sure what you’d use it for … exactly … but it could probably reconcile and figure out all your credit card charges based on your message history and location, allocate charges to budgets, and show more analytics than you’re probably interested in knowing.
People with a cloud connected car such as a Tesla could probably get some real “personal assistant” type use cases out of this, such as automatically sorting your personal and business travel kms, expenses and such for tax purposes.
There’s probably other use cases like suggesting local experiences you haven’t done before, and helping you with time management.
Could make for a very interesting/useful/private personal assistant.
(When noodling on this, I’ve also been wondering about putting metadata for files in sidecar files next to the files they describe, rather than a centralized SQLite database. Did you experiment with anything like that by any chance?)
I might not be the typical user for this, because I'd prefer my data to actually stay in the cloud where it is, but I'd still like to have it indexed and timelined. Can timelinize do this? Like, instead of downloading everything from gphoto, youtube, bluesky, wtv, just index what's there and offer the same interface? And only optionnaly download the actual data in addition to the meta-data?
The debate between importing he data and indexing external data is a long, grueling one, but ultimately I cannot be satisfied with not having my data guaranteed to be locally available.
I suppose in the future it's possible we could add the ability to index external data, but this likely wouldn't work well in practice since most data sources lock down real-time access via their API restrictions.
One thing I wish for encompasses the idea that I might want to share different slices of my life with different groups
Being able to share a time-based, geo-based, or X-based slice (all or some of) with someone would be a great way to learn about "close encounters" before or after we met, or even someone else's perspective of a shared trip or experience.
Just a general comment; you've made something truly wonderful (IMHO), and I look forward to seeing where you take this.
This could be a really interesting as a digital forensics thing.
I am also slowly "offlining" my life. Currently, it is a mix of synology, hard drives and all.
I have always thought about building a little dashboard to access everything really. Build a financial dashboard[1] and now onto photos.
FreeMyCash looks great! Yours is the second financial application I've heard of; maybe we need to look at adding some finance features soon.
How does this handle data updating / fixing? My use case is importing data that's semi structured. Say you get data from a 3rd party provider from one dump, and it's for an event called "jog". Then they update their data dump format so "jog" becomes subdivided into "light run" vs "intense walk", and they also applied it retroactively. In this case you'd have to reimport a load of overlapping data.
I saw the FAQ and it only talks about imports not strictly additive.
I am dealing with similar use cases of evolving data and don't want to deal with SQL updating, and end up working entirely in plain text. One advantage is that you can use git to enable time traveling (for a single user it still works reasonably).
> How does this handle data updating / fixing?
In the advanced import settings, you can customize what makes an item unique or a duplicate. You can also configure how to handle duplicates. By default, duplicates are skipped. But they can also be updated, and you can customize what gets updated and which of the two values to keep.
But yes, updates do run an UPDATE query, so they're irreversible. I explored schemas that were purely additive, so that you could traverse through mutations of the timeline, but this got messy real fast, and made exploring (reading) the timeline more complex/slow/error-prone. I do think it would be cool though, and I may still revisit that, because I think it could be quite beneficial.
With 2D time you can ask complex questions about what you knew when, with simpler questions automatically extended into a question about the current time. Like:
"What is the price?" -> "What is the price today, as of today?"
"What was the price in 2022" -> "What was the price in 2022, as of today?"
"What was the price in 2022, as of 2023?"
Docs: https://docs.xtdb.com/concepts/key-concepts.html#temporal-co... | 2025 Blog: https://xtdb.com/blog/diy-bitemporality-challenge | Visualization tool: https://docs.xtdb.com/concepts/key-concepts.html#temporal-co...
One interesting scenario re time traveling is if we use an LLM somewhere in data derivation. Say there's a secondary processor of e.g. journal notes that yield one kind of feature extraction, but the model gets updated at some point, then the output possibilities expand very quickly. We might also allow human intervention/correction, which should take priority and resist overwrites. Assuming we're caching these data then they'll also land somewhere in the database and unless provenance is first class, they'll appear just as ground truth as any other.
Bitemporal databases look interesting but the amount of scaffolding above sqlite makes the data harder to manage.
So if I keep ground truth data as text, looks like I'm going to have an import pipeline into timelinize, and basically ensure that there's a stable pkey (almost certainly timestamp + qualifier), and always overwrite. Seems feasible, pretty exciting!
(I don't think all my photo/video archives would fit on my laptop, though the thumbnails definitely would, while minio or something replicated between my desktop plus a backup machine at Hetzner or something would definitely do the thing)
I even encountered crashes within sqlite when using ExFAT -- so file system choice is definitely important! (I've since implemented a workaround for this bug by detecting exfat and configuring sqlite to avoid WAL mode, so it's just... much slower.)
Very nice project, it is something what we all need right now in these days. Just noticed that you recommend Apple Silicon M2 or newer? Is there really a significant difference between M1 and M2? Is it running some LLM model in the background?
Timelines
Tempor (temporal)
Chronos
Chronografik
Continuum
Momentum (moments, memory, momentum through time)
IdioSync (kinda hate this one tbh)
Who knows! Those are just the ones that fell out of my mouth while typing. It's just gotta have a memorable and easy-to-pronounce cadence. Even "Memorable" is a possibility LOL
-suggestions from some dude, not ChatGPT
I don’t see the link to the rep on on first glance of the linked site, so linking it here: https://github.com/timelinize/timelinize
i want to forget the past except for keeping the warmest moments in my heart.
i know others will feel differently.
that said, beautiful presentation and website!
And yeah, I feel ya. This lets you delete things too.
Have you thought of creating a setup so as to package all libraries and dependencies needed? You have a very nice installation guide, but there are many users who just want the setup.exe :-)
Basically, I would love to know how to do this correctly for each platform, but I don't know how. Help would be welcomed.
But you have control over this:
- You can customize what makes an item a duplicate or unique
- You can choose whether to update existing items, and how to update them (what to keep of the incoming item versus the existing one)
Ten years is a long time. Is it just you? What language is it in? Does it run on desktop or does it need a server? What is the license?
We've been conditioned to simply let our most precious memories and life records (photos, chats, locations) slowly dissolve into the opaque, proprietary silos of mega-corporations. The fact that Timelinize enables us to pull that data back down from Google Takeout, social media exports, and device backups, and then organize it cohesively and locally is a monumental step toward digital self-sovereignty.
What I love most:
Unified Context: Aggregating data across sources (like seeing SMS and Facebook messages with the same person in one unified thread) is genius. This is the crucial context that cloud platforms deliberately fragment.
Local Privacy: Storing everything in an easily navigable local SQLite database is the gold standard for personal data. It means the developer, or any third party, cannot monetize or surveil my history.
Data Longevity: Knowing that even if a service like Google Location History shuts down its export (as it did recently), my historical data is safe and searchable on my own hard drive is the only way to genuinely keep these records "alive forever."
This isn't just a useful app; it's a vital piece of infrastructure for anyone who cares about building a personal, permanent digital archive of their life outside of the corporate cloud. I hope this gains massive traction. Great work on addressing a foundational digital problem!
the giveaway for me is the too-perfect summary list of things it loves the most