How to Actually Remember Your Life (Instead of Just Photographing It)

The problem isn't too few photos. It's too many.

Your phone probably holds more photographs than your grandparents took in their entire lives. Now try to remember a random Tuesday eight months ago. Not a birthday or a trip, just an ordinary day. Usually, nothing comes back. The photos are buried somewhere in the scroll, but the memory is gone.

Photography has never been easier, but it hasn't helped us remember any better. A camera roll with 40,000 pictures is no memory aid. It is a landfill with a search bar.

Johnny Harris argues that the flood of photos is defeating us

The journalist and filmmaker Johnny Harris made this argument in a 2019 video essay, "How to Remember Your Life", that opens with a blunt line: "Most of your life you just can't remember." For Harris, the sheer abundance of photos is the problem. In his description of the video, he puts it this way:

"You probably have more pictures than you know what to do with. Phones are amazing for taking lots of shots but often the result is too many photos."

When every moment produces a burst of near-identical shots, no single photo feels precious enough to revisit. Pictures you never return to do nothing for memory. They become clutter instead of anchors.

His answer is ruthless curation. Delete the redundant shots and keep a small, meaningful set. Each survivor then becomes valuable enough to return to. One chapter of the video is literally titled "Deleting as reliving." A photo that gets looked at again is a memory anchor. Ten thousand that don't are a backup of nothing.

The science agrees: taking photos can actively hurt memory

In 2014, psychologist Linda Henkel ran a now-famous experiment published in Psychological Science. Participants toured a museum, photographing some objects and simply observing others. The next day, they remembered fewer of the objects they had photographed and fewer details about them than the ones they had only looked at. Henkel called it the photo-taking-impairment effect. When you trust the camera to remember for you, your brain quietly opts out of the job.

Later work added texture rather than contradiction. Research by Alixandra Barasch, Kristin Diehl and colleagues found that choosing to take a photo, rather than shooting on autopilot, shifts you into more active visual attention. A study by Peggy St. Jacques and Daniel Schacter showed the other half of the loop. People who later reviewed photos of an experience recalled more of it and could even enrich the memory each time it resurfaced. Photos are not neutral, either. A 2024 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that having photos of an event literally changes the perspective from which you remember it. Photographs store memories, but they also reshape them.

What makes deliberate photography different

Henkel's experiment also contained a crucial exception. When participants were told to zoom in on one specific detail of an object, they had to make a deliberate choice about a single shot. The impairment effect vanished. Their memory of the photographed object was as strong as it was for objects they had studied with their eyes alone.

The results draw a practical distinction. Mindless, unlimited photography weakens memory, while deliberate, constrained photography can strengthen it when one intentional shot is revisited later. The evidence puts the blame on unlimited shooting, not the camera itself.

What helps photographs become memories

A useful memory archive looks nothing like a modern camera roll:

• Few photos, not many. Scarcity is what makes a photo worth returning to.
• Ordinary days, not highlights. The vacations were always going to be remembered. It is the unremarkable Tuesdays that vanish without an anchor.
• Dated and sequenced. Memory feeds on chronology; a timeline does what a jumbled grid can't.
• Actually revisited. This is the step that does the remembering. An archive you never open is indistinguishable from no archive at all.

Harris got there through curation, deleting his way down to a precious few. There is another route, too: avoid overshooting in the first place.

BeReal accidentally built the right constraints for memory

BeReal follows that pattern surprisingly closely. You get one photo a day, taken when the app prompts you rather than when something photogenic happens. That schedule brings ordinary, unstaged moments into the archive, precisely the moments memory research says most need external anchors. Retakes are limited. There are no bursts or filters. The result is a single deliberate frame, much closer to Henkel's "zoom in" condition than to tourist-mode snapping. The app then dates each photo and places it in a calendar of your actual life.

BeReal handles the constraint for you, so nobody has to imitate Harris's curation habit. A year of BeReal contains 365 photos. You can revisit that many in an evening. The boring days remain, and the calendar order makes the collection read like a diary. One academic essay in Flow Journal compared BeReal's Memories archive to a childhood locked diary. The comparison fits, including the uncomfortable detail that you don't hold the key.

People practiced this ritual long before BeReal existed

This daily-photo practice is older than BeReal. In 2009, the digital artist Jonathan Harris (no relation to Johnny) began taking one photograph every day with a short story attached. He kept it up for 443 consecutive days. Harris described himself as obsessed with memory and saw the ritual as a way to enrich his experience of time. In 2012, Cesar Kuriyama stood on the TED stage and described recording one second of video every day. He began for a painfully relatable reason: he couldn't remember his twenties. Years before BeReal turned the habit into a product, both men had followed the same instinct: take a small daily record on a schedule, including the days that would otherwise pass unphotographed.

Kuriyama also identified the bias BeReal would later solve mechanically. We reach for our cameras when something wonderful is happening and almost never when life is mundane or bad. A ritual records your real life only if it follows a schedule you don't control.

The catch: a memory archive you don't own isn't an archive

Earlier digital archives show the risk. Jonathan Harris went on to build Cowbird, a platform where some 25,000 people wrote 100,000 stories as a public library of human memory. It shut down in 2017. Facebook Moments, a dedicated photo-memories app, was shut down in 2019 with a save-your-photos-by-this-date deadline. Apple retired My Photo Stream. Snapchat deletes your Memories thirty days after you delete your account. Their details differ, but they share an uncomfortable fact: platforms that hold your memories are rentals, not archives. The landlord can renovate, sell, or demolish. Your only recourse is to have moved your things out in time.

Your BeReal history is subject to exactly the same physics. The most memory-dense archive you own contains one honest photo of every single day, yet it sits inside one app on one phone, behind one account.

Keep the ritual. Own the archive.

A modest set of candid photos, kept in date order and revisited over the years, is the closest thing the research offers to a technique for remembering a life. BeReal builds that set for you each day. The lingering problem is whether it will still exist in ten years. Keeping it means getting the files out of the app and into your own hands. If you want your daily archive to outlive any app's roadmap, make sure your memories outlive the app, and when you're ready, here's how to export your full archive.

Your grandparents kept a shoebox of photographs that survived every house move. Yours shouldn't be the first generation whose diary disappears with an app store listing.

Sources: Henkel, "Point-and-Shoot Memories," Psychological Science (2014) · Barasch, Diehl et al., "Photographic Memory" · St. Jacques & Schacter, Psychological Science (2013) · King et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology (2024) · Johnny Harris, "How to Remember Your Life" (2019) · Jonathan Harris, "Today" (2009–10) · Cesar Kuriyama, TED (2012) · Banks, Monier & Stowell, "Time to Be Real?," Flow Journal (2023)