A selfie timelapse that is actually watchable

Everyone has seen the viral videos: a face, aging years in seconds, eyes perfectly still while everything else drifts. Then you try it with your own camera roll and get a slideshow that jumps like a broken film reel. The difference is alignment.

Why raw daily selfies do not cut it

Take a selfie tomorrow. Take another the day after. Put them side by side: your head sits a centimeter higher, the camera is a hand's width closer, you are turned a few degrees because the window was on that side. None of it registers as a mistake while you shoot. All of it registers as a jolt when the two frames play back a twelfth of a second apart.

That is the problem with a raw camera roll. The face is the subject, but the frame is anchored to the phone, and the phone moves every single day. Play three hundred of those in sequence and the viewer spends the whole video re-finding your face instead of watching it change. The change is in there. It is buried under the shaking.

Photographers solve this with a tripod, a mark on the floor and a fixed focal length. It works, and almost nobody keeps it up for a year.

Face detection does the boring work

The other solution is to fix the face instead of the camera. Selfeed runs face detection on every photo you add, finds you in the frame, and crops around the face so it lands in the same place each time — your eyes holding still from one shot to the next while everything else moves around them.

That single step is the difference between a slideshow and a timelapse. Once the eyes are pinned, the rest becomes signal: the jaw, the hair, the skin, the seasons behind you. The viewer stops tracking the frame and starts reading the change.

It also means you can shoot handheld, in whatever room you happen to be standing in, with no mark on the floor and no ritual. Point the camera at your face, roughly. The alignment is not your job.

One photo a day is the rhythm that makes motion read

Alignment makes the motion smooth. Rhythm makes it mean something.

Selfeed keeps one photo per day per album — not the best of six, not a burst. An even sampling rate is what lets anyone read time off the finished video: one frame is one day, so a hundred frames is a hundred days, and the pace of change is honest. Shoot three today and none tomorrow and the video quietly lies about how fast you changed.

It keeps the daily habit simple, too. There is one thing to do and one unambiguous way to know you did it: a reminder at the hour you picked, in your own time zone, and a streak that counts only the days you actually showed up.

Several series running in parallel

One timelapse is rarely enough. Albums run side by side, and each keeps its own streak and its own timelapse, so they never interfere: a daily portrait in flat window light, a beard growing out from the first stubble, a pregnancy, a training year, a child.

Miss a day in one album and that streak resets while the others carry on untouched — and the photos themselves are never lost, so the missed day costs you a single frame, not the series. An album can run for years. It can also end the day its story does — nothing forces a series to be permanent, and nothing caps how many you run at once.

How to start today

Nothing here needs to be decided in advance. Open the web app at app.selfeed.life, take a frame, and choose the hour you want to be reminded. Native iOS and Android apps are in the works; on iOS you can also fill in past days, one day at a time — open a day, and Selfeed shows you the selfies you took that day with a single clear face in them. Pick one and the day is filled. A free account reaches ninety days back — about eleven seconds of film — and Selfeed Pro reaches the whole library, so a series can start well before the day you installed anything.

Your photos are private by default: nothing about the series goes anywhere unless you put it there yourself. When it is long enough to be worth watching, you export the timelapse from the app and decide for yourself who sees it.

What a year of it actually looks like

This page is about the technique. What the result is like to live with — why the first month shows nothing, what a year turns out to be a record of, and who ends up seeing it — is its own page.