It started the way it does for a lot of families. There were boxes of old photographs tucked away in storage. Some in albums, some loose, some going back decades. Birthdays, holidays, first days of school, family reunions. The kind of photos you pick up and suddenly you're right back there.
When I finally sat down to scan them, I had about 8,000 photos. I wanted to get them into Google Photos so the whole family could enjoy them. But when I imported them, every photo showed up as if it was taken the day I scanned it. Decades of weddings, birthdays, and holidays, all dumped into one clump in the middle of our timeline.
So I built one. It looks at the front of each photo and estimates when it was taken from the clothes, cars, decor, and film type. Then it reads the back: the handwritten names, dates, and captions. It saves those as the photo's description and updates the date in the file so each photo lands in the right year in Google Photos, Apple Photos, or Immich.
After using it on my own collection, I realized I'm not the only one with boxes of old photos. When you finally scan yours, they deserve better than being dumped into today.
When they're in the right place in your timeline, you can scroll through your library and watch your family's story unfold, just as it happened.
That's why I built Timeline Scan. Not as a tech project, but as something for real families. Those boxes of photos are your history. They deserve to be somewhere you can find them.
