Experiments in Lifelogging, Part 6: Photo overload - some suggestions for the Narrative app

After two months of wearing the Narrative Clip, lots of footage of my life is starting to pile up. The point has been reached where the restrictions of the Narrative app are starting to become apparent - and quite a bit of a nuisance, too.

Right now, you only get a chronological list of the moments (newest on top), each with a cover photo, a timestamp and a location. On average, I get about 3 new moments every day, so I'm well above 100 moments now (I can't even easily see how many there are!). It simply is getting increasingly hard to find that specific moment again that you have in mind. So I hope that Narrative are hard at work at improving the app already.

Here are some thoughts and ideas that I think would make the app easier to use:

• First of all, we really need a proper tablet version of the app. Using a blown-up iPhone app on an iPad just doesn't cut it any more.
• A more compact list view would make it easier to "go back in time" when scrolling through the moments.
• Give me an option to jump to a specific date. Display a calendar, mark all the dates that have moments attached to them and jump to those moments when I tap on the date.
• I'd like to be able to name moments or add tags to them. Leaving notes would also be nice (for moments or even for individual photos).
• Following that, it should be possible to search for tags and notes.
• An option to split and merge moments. I have some moments from events that are inexplicably split into two parts, but also longer moments that I would really like to split into separate phases, e.g. travel to/from an event and the actual event.
• All the sharing options that you have in the moments view should also be available in the starred photo view. It's nice that I can highlight good / important snapshots, but right now I can't really do anything with them.
• The "view in moment" option should take you to the actual photo in the moment, not just the start of the moment.
• Starred photos should be sorted by date by default. Right now, they are sorted by the time you starred them, so if you go through an older moment again and think "Oh, that's a nice photo" and star it, it will show up as the first photo in the list, despite its age.

And then I'd like to see all of the app's functionality being available through a website. Having an API is a bit further down on my wishlist - let us access our photos in all sorts of ways so we can build new apps of our own. Oh, and make it somehow less dependent on having a computer around.

But for now, it's really important to improve the way in which we can access our past moments easily. Pretty, please?

(An ongoing selection of snapshots from my Narrative Clip can be found on Flickr)