Watching your own face over years

You have never seen your face change. Not once. You look at it every day, and a thing observed continuously appears not to move at all — the same reason you cannot watch a tide come in by staring at it. A mirror is structurally unable to show you this, and a photograph a day is the only instrument that can.

What the first month looks like

Nothing. That is not a warning, it is the point. Thirty frames is a month of a face doing what faces do, which is very little. The medium only starts working somewhere past a hundred, and it becomes obvious past two hundred.

Which means the honest way to describe the first weeks is: you are not making anything yet, you are accumulating the material something will later be made of. A habit that promises a payoff on day four is lying about what it is.

The eyes are what hold it together

Take three hundred selfies over a year and play them in order and you get a slideshow: your head jumps around the frame, the camera is closer, then further, then tilted. The change you were after is buried under the noise of the photographs themselves.

Selfeed crops each frame around your face with your eyes pinned to the same point, so the only thing left moving is you. It is the difference between footage and a folder — and it is the whole reason a year is watchable rather than merely stored. How that actually works is its own page; this one is about what you see when it has.

Nobody has to see it

This one is more private than most. A daily photograph of your own face, on days you feel nothing like being photographed, is not a thing to perform.

So: nothing leaves the account on its own. Being visible takes three separate acts — a handle, a public profile, a featured album — and the featured album is one album, not the account. You can keep a diary of your face private for years while something else entirely is the one on show.

If you do let people in, the mechanism is quiet: your frame reaches the people who follow you on their home screen, without a notification and without anything being opened. And on the days your own reasons for taking it run out, seeing that somebody else took theirs is a surprisingly durable substitute.

What you are actually keeping

Every day's frame stays for good on a free account. The original photograph is kept for ninety days free and for as long as you keep the account on Selfeed Pro. A project measured in years should not be quietly bounded by a retention policy nobody told you about — so that is the whole policy, stated before you start.

What a year of it shows

Not ageing, mostly. Ageing is far too slow to see in twelve months. What a year shows is everything else: a haircut growing out and being cut again, one summer, a bad autumn, the exact fortnight you started sleeping properly, the week you were ill. It is a record of a life at the resolution the life was actually lived at.

You can run more than one at a time — a beard growing out, a room being renovated, a child — each in its own album with its own streak and its own film, none of them competing for the same day.

You can start with a backlog

Your camera roll almost certainly contains hundreds of front-camera photographs, scattered but dated. On iOS, opening a past day offers the ones from that day with a single clear face, and one tap files it. Ninety days back on a free account — about eleven seconds of film — and the whole library on Pro.

So the first evening is not a promise about next year. It is a short film of the last three months, made of photographs you had already taken and never looked at in order.