A Momento Alternative for the Days You Didn't Post
Momento builds a diary out of what you’ve already made: posts, photos, check-ins, videos, pulled in from the apps you use and laid out day by day, with an on-this-day view over the top. When your accounts are busy, it’s a lovely thing to scroll.
The catch shows up as posting slows down, which for most people it has. A diary assembled from your feeds is a diary of the days worth posting about — the trips, the meals out, the occasions. The ordinary Wednesday isn’t in there, because nobody posts an ordinary Wednesday, and ordinary Wednesdays are most of a life.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Walked the long way home for no reason.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
One sentence about the part nobody photographed
Little Memory, an iPhone app, asks you for the thing your feed doesn’t have. It’s one sentence about what happened today, about fifteen seconds. Got the bike fixed. Neighbor’s cat came in again. Long day, good soup. None of that would ever have been a post, and all of it is exactly what you’d like to read in a year.
And then you do read it. Your lines come back to you a week later, a month later, and on this date every year after — the same pleasure as an on-this-day feed, built from a source that doesn’t dry up when you stop posting.
Little memory is an app I treasure on my iPhone. It is wonderful to receive memories and think about good times, milestones, and even tougher times that I’ve since overcome.
E., reader letter
Little Memory vs. Momento
| Little Memory | Momento | |
|---|---|---|
| Where entries come from | You write one line | Imported from your apps and feeds, plus notes you add |
| A day’s entry | One sentence, photo if you like | Whatever your day generated, plus notes, tags, places |
| Days with nothing posted | Still get an entry | Mostly empty |
| Time it takes | About fifteen seconds | Little, since most of it arrives on its own |
| Old entries come back | Brought to you after a week, a month, a year | On-this-day view when you open it |
| Write by email | Yes — reply to the nightly reminder and the entry is saved | No |
| Plans | $0.99, with one optional premium subscription | Free tier, then a premium subscription |
The basics are all there too — search across every entry, streaks, most used words, emotion trends, automated nightly backups to Dropbox, and full export anytime. The little tour has the whole list. Everything is private by default, with no accounts to connect.
Little Memory has been quietly running since 2011, and support comes straight from the developer.
Who should stay with Momento
If you post a lot and what you want is all of it gathered in one place, automatically, Momento does that and Little Memory doesn’t import anything at all. It’s also the better choice if you’d rather not have to write anything, ever — a fair preference, and one this app can’t accommodate, since the one sentence is the whole mechanism.
But if your imported diary has thinned out along with your posting, fifteen seconds a night refills it from the only source that never runs out.
(Coming for the resurfacing specifically? There’s a Timehop comparison too.)
