I realised I had hundreds of Live Photos on my iPhone that I never actually listened to. Apple hides the audio behind a long-press gesture, and my phone is nearly always in silent mode — so I had effectively never heard most of them.

When I started playing a few back with sound, it caught me off guard. The laughter, ambient street noise, a quiet voice in the background — it triggered memory in a way the photo alone didn’t.

So I built LifeSampuru, a small iOS app that lets you browse your Live Photos by sound, loop them, trim them, and export the audio. There’s also a waveform viewer/selector and a “Sakura” feature for curating the moments you want to come back to.

This began as a technical experiment, but it’s changed how I look at my photo library.