I like the idea of Timehop: seeing all of the photos I took on this day in years past. I don’t like the idea of sharing all of my photos with a third party, so I built an open-source replacement for Timehop that runs on my own computer and server; it’s called Clockback.

Clockback is two things:

• a BASH script that uploads all of the photos I took this week in previous years
• a single-page web app that displays the photos from this day:

To use Clockback, you only need two things:

1. Your photos organized so that their filename begins with the date on which they were taken, e.g. “1969-07-20 – Moon landing.jpg”. (I use iPhoto Disc Export to do this.)
2. A Web server to upload them to.

As long as you can run the script included in Clockback once per week from your computer, the Clockback webpage will have photos to show, and it will remove old photos, so it doesn’t use a lot of disk space.

To get the code and all of the details on how to run Clockback, check out the README in the GitHub repo.