For years my iPhone photo library felt like a digital junk drawer.

Blurry shots, old screenshots, bursts, duplicates… Every time I opened Photos I thought: "I should really clean this up someday."

I tried doing big cleanup sessions: block off an hour, scroll forever, delete a few dozen photos, feel drained and guilty, close the app. Nothing really changed.

The problem wasn’t the photos. It was the shape of the task. "Clean up your whole library" is terrible for a human brain: no clear endpoint, no natural stopping point, and very little sense of progress.

So instead of a one‑time project, I turned it into a tiny daily ritual – and then built an app around that ritual.

The method: "On This Day" + a few minutes

Once a day, I only review a small, bounded batch of photos – either photos taken on this calendar day in past years, or a small random batch.

-----

My routine now:

1. Open the app once a day.

2. See a handful of photos from "On This Day".

3. Swipe up to delete obvious junk.

4. Optionally keep one or two meaningful photos.

5. When that day's batch is done, close the app.

Sessions are usually 2–5 minutes. The emotional reward becomes "oh, that trip / friend / moment", not "I must fix my entire photo mess today".

Over months this quietly removes thousands of useless photos and reclaims storage, without any big "declutter day".

-----

What I built: Odays

I turned this pattern into an iOS app called Odays.

It:

• Shows you "On This Day" photos from your existing iCloud / iPhone library.

• Optimizes for a swipe‑to‑delete flow.

• Sync with your system Photos app.

• Keeps everything on‑device; the app doesn’t upload your photos anywhere.

It’s intentionally narrow: not a bulk‑operation power tool, but a small, sustainable ritual on top of your existing library.

If you want to try it, here’s the App Store link:

Odays – Relive & Tidy Photos https://apps.apple.com/app/id6479229303

Happy to answer questions about the product decisions, UX trade‑offs, or the indie dev side.

The Roadmap Is Not the System

Why Your Cache Might Be Slowing You Down

Scientists use 'negative light' to send secret messages hidden inside heat

IIIF: Images and Visual Presentations for the Web

Grasp Protocol

Dreaming of a Ten-Year Computer

GitHub's Continuous AI for Accessibility

Apple M chips performance predictions

Stateless rate limiting using self-consuming cryptographic hash chains

The AI productivity paradox: More work, not less

Neubrutalism: A Guide to the Design Movement

FlashHead: Up to 40% Faster Multimodal Reasoning on Top of Quantization

Show HN: Algorithms and Data Structures in TypeScript – Free Book (~400 Pages)

Delta Sales App

Pin – decentralized web hosting mesh for Raspberry Pi

ZTE F673AV9a GPON ONT – 4GE Ports and Dual-Band WiFi Router

What Cops Saw Chasing Down New Jersey Drones

Erasing the Word "Woman"

Churning butter while agents churn code

Chinese boats mass at sea, raising questions

Building a strong data infrastructure for AI agent success

Firefox ESR 115 support extended until the end of August 2026

Show HN: Odays – a stress‑free "On This Day" ritual to declutter 40k photos

Carney announces billions for defense and infrastructure in Canada's North

Construction pipe suddenly rises 13 meters above ground in Osaka

Major weakness: Apple MacBook Neo battery life

Google rushes Chrome update fixing two zero-days under attack

New research shows most gamers find playing with AI NPCs to be enjoyable

Academia and the "AI Brain Drain"

I built a Free AI Answer Generator with 14 languages and tone control

Show HN: Flowly – Smooth scrolling for third-party mice on macOS

Comments