Timelinize: Your Personal Life Archive & Digital Timeline

Reclaim Your Digital Life: Introducing Timelinize, the Ultimate Personal Timeline

In an age where our digital lives are fragmented across countless apps and cloud services, the concept of truly owning and understanding our personal data feels increasingly distant. Enter Timelinize: an ambitious open-source project dedicated to putting you back in control of your digital memories.

Timelinize is a self-hosted application designed to gather your photos, videos, chats, messages, location history, social media content, contacts, and more into a single, cohesive timeline on your own computer. Imagine having all your life's digital footprints organized, searchable, and viewable offline – a truly comprehensive archive of your existence.

Why Timelinize Matters: A Vision for Personal Data Sovereignty

The project's motivation stems from a fundamental challenge of the modern digital era: while our lives are better documented than ever before, the record of them is often ephemeral and locked away in proprietary systems. Timelinize aims to liberate your data from corporations, ensuring that your precious memories remain yours, accessible and preserved for generations.

Creator Matt Holt envisions a future where individuals can pull up a single screen displaying all their online data – photos, social posts, location movements, health metrics, and even music listened to – for any given day. This unified view fosters new insights, allowing users to 'zoom out' and grasp the bigger picture of their lives. Beyond mere aggregation, Timelinize offers features to:

• Unify Data: Import from a vast array of sources, including Google Takeout, Apple iCloud, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Strava, and more. It intelligently handles various file types and formats, even compressed archives.
• Intelligent Organization: Data is indexed in a SQLite database and stored on disk, organized by date. Timelinize recognizes entities (people, pets, organizations) across different data sources, allowing for powerful filtering and organization. It can even merge entities automatically or manually.
• Emergent Conversations: Messages from different platforms (e.g., Facebook Messenger, SMS) are aggregated into coherent conversations, complete with reactions, giving you a full communication history.
• Rich Visualizations: Explore your past through dynamic dashboards, classic timeline views, detailed item views, and stunning 3D maps that pinpoint where memories happened. Even non-geolocated data can appear on maps by associating it with entities that do have location data.
• Privacy-First Approach: Everything runs on your own computer. No one else has access to your data but you, reinforcing the core principle of personal data control.

An Evolving Project with a Powerful Future

Currently in its early alpha stage, Timelinize is actively being developed (licensed under AGPL-3.0 to prevent proprietary forks). While early adopters should be aware of potential schema changes requiring timeline recreation, the project promises significant improvements. The long-term vision includes machine learning algorithms to summarize periods of your life, cross-referencing personal timelines with global historical events, and even enabling family members to merge their timelines to create a richer collective history.

How to Get Started

If you're eager to take control of your digital legacy, Timelinize offers a compelling solution. You can download the latest release for your platform or explore the project's GitHub repository to contribute to its development. The project also features a command-line interface and convenient development container setups for easy contribution.

Timelinize isn't just a tool; it's a philosophy – a movement towards a more private, organized, and comprehensible digital self. Join the community and start building your ultimate personal timeline today.