Timelinize: Merge Your Digital Life into One Simple Timeline

If you're anything like me, your personal data is scattered everywhere. Photos live in Google Photos and iCloud, check-ins are on Swarm, bookmarks are in Pocket, and notes are strewn across various apps. Trying to look back at a specific week or month means jumping between a dozen different services and feeds. It's fragmented and frustrating.

What if you could bring all those streams together into a single, unified, chronological timeline? That's the idea behind Timelinize. It's a tool that aims to simplify personal data archival by merging all your digital streams into one coherent timeline you own and control.

What It Does

Timelinize is a self-hostable web application that acts as a central hub for your personal data. You connect it to various services (think of them as "source adapters") like Google Photos, Twitter, Goodreads, or your plain text notes. It then pulls your activity from these sources, normalizes the data, and displays everything in a single, reverse-chronological feed—your own personal timeline.

The core goal is archival and unification. It's not trying to be another social network or a real-time dashboard. It's a private, personal history built from the digital breadcrumbs you leave across the internet.

Why It's Cool

The clever part is in its adapter-based architecture. The system is built to be extensible. The core Timelinize application handles the timeline, storage, and UI, while separate, modular "source adapters" are responsible for talking to specific APIs (Google Takeout, Mastodon, etc.) and converting that data into a common format.

This means the project can grow without becoming a monolithic beast. Anyone can build an adapter for a new service. Want to add your Strava runs or Letterboxd diary? You (or someone in the community) can write an adapter for it without touching the main app logic.

It's also cool because it prioritizes ownership. You self-host it, so your aggregated data stays with you. It's a step towards reclaiming your digital history from platform silos and putting it in a format that's simple, portable, and entirely yours.

How to Try It

The quickest way to get a feel for Timelinize is to check out the live demo. The creators have one running with sample data, so you can see the interface and flow without setting anything up.

Live Demo: https://demo.timelinize.com

If you're ready to run your own instance, the project is on GitHub. It's built with Node.js and SvelteKit, and the repository has clear instructions for getting started with Docker or a local development setup.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/timelinize/timelinize

The README is your best friend here. It'll guide you through cloning the repo, setting up environment variables, and running the initial setup. You'll start by adding adapters for the services you want to import from.

Final Thoughts

As developers, we often think about data portability and ownership in the abstract. Timelinize is a practical, running start at solving that problem for personal data. Even if you don't use it daily, the architecture is a neat reference for how to build a modular, adapter-based ingestion system.

For me, the appeal is in having a static, queryable archive of my own life. It's a project that feels both useful and philosophically aligned with the indie web ethos. It might start as a weekend project to consolidate your photos and tweets, but it could evolve into a lifelong personal archive. That's a pretty powerful idea, built with a clean, developer-friendly approach.

Follow for more interesting projects: @githubprojects