I’m a father. From the very first day my first child was born, I started taking photos. A lot of them.
Photos turned into videos, and before I knew it, it became a little bit too much that I had to spend a lot of time managing them.
So I started using an app to turn each month’s photos into videos. I kept them on my own hard drive, and also backed them up to Google Photos.
That app was 1 Second Everyday.
It’s a really good app. Back then, I recommended it to many of my colleagues and friends who had just become parents.
I can barely remember, in the beginning, it has a limit on number of media or media length per day. So I had to carefully choose which to keep.
So you can see in the above image, for the first few months, each video was only about a couple of minutes long. One, two minute per month. That was alright. (And now I am generating much longer video each month).
Why are there blue blocks covering the faces?
Because one day I realized how powerful AI has become, and as a father, I felt I should do my best to protect my children’s facial data.
Then I discovered that 1SE, by default, was copying my photos and videos and backing them up to their cloud servers. That was the moment an alarm quietly went off in my mind.
I dug through the settings and turned that feature off.
And I kept paying for the subscription, even though that included the features I don't want to use. I still wanted a way to export those monthly videos of my children and my life.
These memories have almost no value to anyone else. But to me, they are very, very precious.
In that thumbnail above, near the bottom, one of the frames shows my grandmother holding my daughter. My grandmother has passed away last year. I’m just grateful that moment was captured, organized, and preserved.
In the end, after seven years of paying for a subscription, I finally found a bit of free time to build my own app with the same purpose.
I focused on only two things:
- Privacy first. Never back up the user’s photos or videos to the cloud.
- It has to be fast.
That was how Minute It was born.
Privacy first
I’m not sure how much people still care about privacy these days, especially when convenience and speed are so tempting.
Even me, I still use Google Photos myself. Maybe in practice we can only choose to trust big companies. If something goes wrong, at least they would face consequences.
So, Minute It is designed for privacy from the day 1. It basically only needs two permissions:
- Photo library access
- Network access
Of course it needs photo library access. Minute It reads the photos and videos already on your device and stitches them into one video for you. A user overseas once used the word “stitch,” and I thought it was wonderfully accurate.
The network permission is there for a different reason. As the developer, I need Google Crashlytics to tell me whether the app is crashing for users. If there’s a bug, I need to fix it. I can’t just ship the app and disappear.
That’s it.
If there are any other permissions involved, they would only be there because of iOS or Android system interactions.
Because privacy comes first. That is my belief, as a father.
In the settings page of Minute It, I even left a cloud backup switch.
Wait, what? After saying all that, there’s still a cloud backup switch?
If you’re curious, go tap it yourself.
It has to be fast
I used 1SE all the way until last October. Every month, I usually generated videos that were around thirty minutes long. One for my daughter. Another 30 minutes video for my son.
Every time I exported a thirty-minute video, it took long enough for me to go take a long bath and let it run on its own.
I understand why. Processing photos and videos naturally takes CPU time. And on a phone, if the CPU is occupied for too long, especially in the background, iOS or Android may kill the app. I understand all of that.
So I push myself to reduce the exporting/processing time as much as I could. I set the 1SE as the model and wanted to compare the export time of Minute It and 1SE.
So, I made this side-by-side video, and I uploaded other untouched, un-editted recordings of both apps to YouTube as reference.
On the same phone, with the same time range and the same collection of media, exporting a video of the same length, about 10 minutes and 28 seconds:
- Minute It took about 103 seconds.
- 1SE took, roughly, 6 minutes. I was too lazy to wait for the end.
It is Not Too Bad, I think.
It seems that the ideas and techniques I’ve learned over the years in software, algorithms, and app development are still useful after all.
And one more thing: choosing photos every time is tiring.
So I also built a one-tap quick selection mode that can generate a short video, around sixty seconds from the last 30 days, and let me quickly revisit what happened over the past month.
That is why I called it Minute It.
Sometimes, I quickly generate a video from the past thirty days. It feels surprisingly moving. It’s not just family. Work, colleagues, basketball, drinks with friends, all of it appears from time to time.
It becomes the kind of video that you would smile at. But honetly speakling, just you. It is valuable only to you.
And I feel good about it. Because it is, like tailor-made to me, and only to me.
I believe you will definitely feel the same.
Anyway, I built this app to solve my own problem. Maybe it can also solve the problem of another father somewhere on this planet, and save him a little bit of time.
And maybe, through this app, a small seed can be planted in someone’s mind: to pay a little more attention to privacy, to facial data, to the strange ease with which we hand these things away.
Maybe, somewhere in the world, because of that tiny bit of attention, some small and good change might happen.
As a father, perhaps that too is a way of making the world just a little better. So that when our children grow up, the world they see may not be quite as bad as it could have been.
At least, that is what I choose to believe.
This page does not include a download link. I only wanted to write down my own path, and, well, to admit that I really did manage to push the export speed quite far. That part feels pretty satisfying.