It’s Throwback Thursday! Time to scroll through your zillions of older photos to post today’s weekly trip down memory lane. But with so many photos to choose from, how do you select which one to show case? Consider asking Timehop, your personal, daily time capsule.
Timehop reminds me that I was doing Harry Potter-related things three years ago… and five years ago.
It’s a simple concept. Timehop keeps track of your various social media posts across all of your accounts, and tracks them all the way until the beginning of time—well, the beginning of your time with that account. Every day, it takes a look at what you were doing on the same day last year… and the year before that… and the year before that… pulling everything into a tidy little newsfeed that’s all about you.
You can connect Timehop with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Dropbox Photos, and iPhoto. It automatically syncs with your phone’s Camera Roll as well. Your daily feed will include every post you made from each of those accounts on the same day in years’ past. You’ll also get a daily pop culture fact about a past event that happened on this day in history.
If you see something you want to share, you can easily do that by tapping the “share” button under the photo. You can post it to any of the accounts you’ve linked with Timehop.
Watch previous App Invasion videos to see our past picks.
The best part about Timehop is that it’s different every single day. You can’t go back and look at previous days, or jump ahead to peek at what’s in store for tomorrow. It’s a temporary feed that only surfaces once a year. Clever, really—because of this fleeting timeline, I check this app without fail every morning.
Cute dino AND a fun “this day in history” fact.
Sometimes, my days are boring; other times, I’m rewarded with inside jokes, vacation photos, and long forgotten photos with friends. And then there are times where Timehop reveals patterns—for example, apparently two Harry Potter movies happened to be released on July 15 (one in 2009 and another in 2011), so I got bombarded with HP midnight movie memories. Sigh.
Even if you don’t want to share photos, Timehop is an awesome tool for reminding you of fun times you’ve had in the past. It brings up older photos that don’t get looked at frequently anymore, funny tweets and threads with friends, and past check-ins that often spark a twinge of nostalgia. Sometimes, I wonder if my daily posts are less for present-day me, and more for my future Timehop diary entries.
Plus, the mascot is a dinosaur. Everyone loves a cute dinosaur.
Author: Leah Yamshon, Associate Managing Editor
Leah Yamshon is a former Macworld editor.