About Timeline Scan

It started the way it does for a lot of families. There were boxes of old photographs tucked away in closets and drawers — 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 over 8,000 photos. I wanted to get them into a digital photo library so the whole family could see them, share them, and enjoy them the way photos are meant to be enjoyed. But when I imported them, every single one showed up as if it was taken the day I scanned it. All 8,000 photos — my parents' wedding, birthdays, graduations, holidays spanning decades — dumped into one massive clump in the middle of my timeline. They were abrupt, out of place, and buried everything around them.

So I built one. I created a tool that could look at the front of an old photo and figure out roughly when it was taken — based on the clothes, the cars in the background, the style of the house, even the type of film. And then it reads the back. All those handwritten notes — the names, the dates, the little descriptions your parents or grandparents wrote — it captures those too and saves them as the photo's description. Then it updates the date and description in the file so that when you add it to Google Photos, Apple Photos, Immich, or any library, it lands right where it should, with the story written on the back right there for everyone to see.

After using it on my own collection, I realized something: I'm not the only one with boxes of old photos. We all have them. Maybe yours are from your parents, or your grandparents. Maybe you've been meaning to scan them for years. And when you finally do, they deserve to be more than a jumbled pile dumped into “today.”

Those photos tell the story of your family. They belong in order — the early years first, then the school days, the weddings, the new babies, the holidays. 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 company, but as something that solves a real problem for real families. Because those boxes of photos aren't just paper — they're your history, your milestones, your people. And they deserve to be somewhere you can find them, enjoy them, and share them with the ones who matter most.