What is an On This Day app — and why it changes how you remember

One morning a few years ago, your phone showed you a photo from exactly three years earlier.

Maybe it was a trip you’d half-forgotten. A friend you don’t see as often as you used to. Your kid at an age they’ll never be again. Your old apartment. A meal from a restaurant that has since closed.

For a moment, you were back there. And then the notification was gone, you were running late, and you moved on.

That experience — that brief, sharp sense of recognition and time passing — is what the “On This Day” feature in photo apps is designed to create. And despite how simple it sounds, it is one of the most psychologically powerful features in consumer technology.

This guide explains what On This Day apps are, why they work, which apps do them best, and how to get more out of the concept than a single dismissible notification.

What is an “On This Day” feature?

An On This Day feature surfaces photos, memories, or journal entries from the same date in previous years. If today is June 28th, the app shows you what you were doing on June 28th last year, two years ago, five years ago.

The concept is simple. The effect is not.

Human memory is associative and fragile. We remember the big moments — weddings, births, milestones — but the texture of ordinary life fades quickly. What we ate for dinner two Tuesdays ago. The route we used to walk to an old job. What our children’s voices sounded like at four.

On This Day features work by doing something memory is poor at: returning to the same moment each year with new eyes. A photo you barely noticed when you took it becomes, three years later, a window into a version of your life you can no longer directly access.

Why On This Day features are so effective

The psychology behind On This Day features draws on a few well-established principles.

Spaced repetition. Returning to the same memory at regular intervals — one year, two years, five years — strengthens retention in a way that passive storage does not. You don’t just have the photo; you remember the day it was taken.

Temporal contrast. Seeing yourself three years ago, in a context that felt ordinary at the time, makes the passage of time legible in a way that is both bittersweet and motivating. It answers the question “where did the time go?” with evidence.

Gratitude and perspective. Research in positive psychology consistently finds that reflecting on past positive experiences increases present wellbeing. On This Day features create a daily micro-practice of that reflection, without requiring any deliberate effort.

Rediscovery. Most people have thousands of photos they have never looked at twice. On This Day resurfaces them in a context — today’s date, a specific year ago — that gives them new meaning.

The feature works so well that it has been adopted by nearly every major photo and social platform: Google Photos, Apple Photos, Facebook, Snapchat, Day One, Timehop. Each does it slightly differently.

Which apps do On This Day best?

Google Photos

Google Photos’ “Memories” feature is the most polished implementation of On This Day available. It surfaces not just a single photo but a curated collection — the best photos from that date, intelligently selected by Google’s AI. It creates short Memory movies automatically. It sends you a notification at a time it has learned you’re likely to check your phone.

The trade-off: this feature requires Google to have analysed all your photos on its servers. The same AI that makes the curation so good is the AI that has processed your entire photo library on Google’s infrastructure. For users who are comfortable with that trade-off, it is excellent. For users who are not, it is the core problem.

Apple Photos

Apple’s “Memories” and “On This Day” features run on-device using Apple Intelligence, which is a meaningful privacy improvement over Google. Apple does not use your photos to train its AI models for advertising. The feature is well-designed and integrated naturally into the Photos app.

The limitation: Apple’s On This Day shows you individual photos rather than narrated stories. It is a reminder, not a retelling.

Timehop

Timehop is the original dedicated On This Day app — it connects to your photo library and social accounts to show you everything from this date across all your past years. It is simple, focused, and loved by its users.

The limitation: Timehop requires you to connect your accounts to their service, which means your photos and social history pass through their servers. It also doesn’t create stories — it shows you individual posts and photos.

Day One

Day One’s On This Day feature works within your journal — if you’ve been journaling consistently, it surfaces the entry you wrote on this date in previous years. For journalers, this is deeply satisfying. The limitation is obvious: it only works if you journal regularly, and it shows you text entries rather than photo memories.

MemoBloom

MemoBloom’s On This Day feature works differently from all of the above — and for a specific reason.

In MemoBloom, On This Day doesn’t show you a single photo or a social post. It shows you full-bleed memory cards — with the cover photo, title, and date — from memories you created on or near this date in previous years. Tap any card and the full memory opens: the AI-written narrative, the animated slideshow with Ken Burns motion, and background music.

The free tier shows a teaser — the single most recent matching memory. Pro unlocks the full reel: every memory from this date across all your years, grouped under “1 year ago,” “2 years ago,” and so on.

The feature runs entirely on-device. No server decides what to show you. No algorithm surfaces it based on engagement or ad relevance. It is just your memories, returned to you on the anniversary of the day they happened.

How to get more out of On This Day

Regardless of which app you use, a few habits make On This Day features significantly more meaningful.

Create memories on significant dates. If you know a date matters — a birthday, an anniversary, the last day of a school year — make a deliberate effort to photograph it and create a memory that day. Future On This Day reminders are only as good as what you put in. (If you want the step-by-step version of turning a set of photos into a memory worth revisiting, we cover that in how to turn your camera roll into a memory story.)

Add context notes. A photo of a dinner table tells you that people gathered. A photo of a dinner table with the note “Dad’s retirement dinner — he kept saying he wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself” tells you what it meant. Those notes are what make On This Day genuinely moving rather than just visually familiar.

Don’t dismiss it immediately. The default behaviour when an On This Day notification appears is to glance at it and move on. Try, occasionally, to actually stop and look at it for a minute. Ask yourself what you remember about that day that the photo doesn’t show. That minute of reflection is the whole point.

Build a library deliberately. On This Day features are only as rich as the memories you’ve created. In the first year of using any memory app, the feature feels thin — there isn’t much to look back on yet. By year three, it becomes one of the things you most look forward to checking each morning. This is the same long-game thinking behind preserving family memories digitally in general — the habit compounds, the archive doesn’t.

The daily habit that costs nothing

There is something quietly valuable about a feature that, once a day, interrupts your present with evidence of your past.

Not a news alert. Not a social notification. Not something that wants your attention in order to sell it to someone else. Just: here is where you were, one year ago today. Here is what it looked like. Here is the story of what happened.

That is what On This Day features do at their best. And for a feature that requires no effort to use — just the decision to create memories worth revisiting — it compounds in a way that very few digital habits do.

By the time you have been using MemoBloom for three years, On This Day is no longer a feature. It is a morning ritual. A daily reminder that your life, in all its ordinary texture, is worth remembering.

MemoBloom is available free on iPhone and Android. All AI processing is on-device. No account required. No photos are uploaded or stored externally.