Open Settings and look at how much of your phone is photographs. For a lot of people it is most of it, and the number has a decade behind it.
Now ask when you last looked at any of them on purpose. Not a photo somebody sent you, not searching for a receipt. Sat down and looked back at a month of your own life.
The honest answer for most people is never. We have all become archivists of a collection nobody reads.
Why it happened
Film cost money per frame, so people took maybe two hundred photographs a year and put the good ones in an album. The album was the point. The taking was in service of the looking.
Digital removed the cost of the frame and then removed the album. What replaced it is an infinite reverse-chronological scroll, which is a superb way to find what you took this morning and a hopeless way to find anything from 2019.
The result is a genuinely odd modern condition: enormous personal archives, almost entirely unvisited.
The organising trap
The standard advice is to organise it. Make albums, tag people, delete the duplicates, cull the blurry ones.
I have watched people try this and I have tried it myself. It fails for a simple reason: the job scales with the size of the collection, and the collection grows faster than anyone can process it. Thirty thousand photographs at three seconds each is twenty-five hours, and by the time you finish there are two thousand more.
Worse, it optimises for the wrong thing. A well-tagged archive is easier to search. But you do not have a searching problem. You know where the wedding photos are. What you have is a browsing problem — you never encounter the ordinary Tuesday from four years ago, because nothing brings it to you.
Two things follow from that.
Do not delete. Storage is cheap and the value of an individual photograph is impossible to judge at the moment you would be deleting it. The blurry one of a kitchen in a flat you no longer live in turns out to matter more, ten years on, than the composed one of a cathedral.
Do not organise. Change how you look instead.
What actually works
Three habits, none of which requires processing the backlog.
Browse by date rather than by scroll. Your life happened in months and seasons, and photographs are timestamped whether you did anything else or not. A calendar view of a single month from three years ago is a startlingly complete record of what you were doing, without anybody having tagged a thing.
Look at the ordinary ones. Everyone photographs holidays and birthdays. The ones that land, years later, are the meals, the back gardens, the dog asleep, the state of somebody's hair. Events are documented from every angle by everyone present. Tuesdays are not.
Use anniversaries. "On this day" is a small feature with a disproportionate effect, because it solves the browsing problem by removing the choice. You are not deciding what to look at; something is handed to you.
The other half of it
There is a reason to care beyond nostalgia.
These archives are also the most detailed record most of us will leave behind. Not the curated posts, but the raw camera roll, with its timestamps and locations and its accidental portrait of what a life actually looked like day to day.
Which is worth two practical thoughts. Make sure somebody could get to it: an account nobody can access is the modern equivalent of a house fire. And be deliberate about where it lives, because a photo library is among the most revealing datasets a person owns, and quite a lot of apps would like a copy.
Where the app comes in
Photo Journals is a calendar for the photographs already on your phone. It does not want to be a social network and it does not want your library.
It reads your existing Apple Photos library and lays it out by date, a month at a time, so you can scroll through 2021 the way you would have flicked through an album. There is an on-this-day view for the anniversary habit, and browsing by year for finding a particular season.
It copies nothing, uploads nothing and modifies nothing. Your photographs stay exactly where they are.
Pick a month from three or four years ago and look at it properly. Most people find that more interesting than they expected, which is rather the point.