PicWay is coming to the App Store soon; it isn’t there yet. This page is about the parts of the app that bring photos back to you: Review, On This Day, Journeys and the widgets. Photos you ask PicWay to skip stay out of its suggestions unless you restore them, and what a widget does when you tap it is spelled out card by card. Each card says what it does and why it was built that way.
How does PicWay make sure a Journey is a real trip?
A Journey is worked out from where and when you took photos, not from “photos close together in time”
What it does. PicWay decides a Journey from the location and date of your photos. These are the rules, in order:
- Your home comes first. A home is a patch of roughly 22 km north to south where you took photos on at least 14 days within 60 days either side of the date being judged, and those days span at least 35 days. There can be several, so if you live between two cities, a trip to either one doesn’t count as “away”. If that window doesn’t have enough days with located photos, or no area qualifies, it widens to 180 days either side, and then to the places you lived around that time across your whole library.
- “Far” means more than 50 km from home. The distance is measured to the nearest home area. 50 km clears the everyday radius around a city, and a stay in a neighbouring city, such as Shanghai and Suzhou (about 80 km apart), is still caught.
- A day away. Only photos with a location count. If at least 60% of that day’s located photos are far from home, it’s a full day away. If the share is lower but at least 2 photos are far, it’s a partial day, which keeps a departure morning at home and an afternoon landing. One far photo alone isn’t enough, though it can stay inside a trip that already has a full day.
- From days to a Journey. At least 2 days away, at least 1 of them a full day, and at least 6 far photos in total. With 2 or more full days in the trip, 3 far photos are enough, so trips with few photos can still count.
- Days with nothing to go on. Up to 2 days in a row with no photos, or none with a location, don’t break a Journey. If the days on both sides are in the same city (within 30 km), up to 5 are allowed. A day when all your photos are near home ends the trip.
- Several places. Days away that fall within 30 km of each other are merged into one stop, and a Journey can have several stops.
Why it works this way. Each number keeps one kind of noise out. The 60% line keeps a single stray GPS point from turning a day at home into a day away. Requiring a full day means a string of partial days, such as commuting or passing through, doesn’t become a trip. The photo count keeps out a “trip” of two days with one photo each; with 2 or more full days the bar drops to 3, because a trip with few photos is still a trip. The longer 5-day gap for the same city is for a drive into mountains with no signal, or a hotel stay with the phone mostly away, but it stays at 2 days between different cities so two unrelated trips don’t get stitched into one. One limitation is known: for the first few weeks after you move, the new home hasn’t built up 35 days of history yet, so those weeks can be mistaken for a trip.
What happens while you review photos?
Add to an album while you review, then undo it with one tap
What it does. While reviewing, you can add the current photo to one or more albums. A note appears with Undo. Undo takes out only the photos that were just added: photos that were already in an album stay there, and no photo is deleted. The note stays for 4 seconds, or 2 seconds when it is a single line with no Undo.
Why it works this way. Adding and undoing go through the same queue, so an undo can never land before the add it belongs to. The note sits on the thumbnail strip, below the row of buttons you decide with, so it doesn’t cover them.
Each card says which albums the photo is already in
What it does. Under the date on a card, one line lists the albums the photo is already in, with Personal Favorites left out. It shows at most two names and “+2” style counts for the rest. A photo that is in no regular album gets no line at all, so it takes up no space.
Why it works this way. The line reads from an index that is already in memory, so every card in a fast swipe can show it without asking the photo library again. The names come in the same order as the “In album” section of the Add to album panel: the two names you see on the card are the first two in the panel.
Leave Review early: nothing set aside means it simply closes
What it does. If you leave before the end and haven’t set anything aside, Review closes straight away and takes you back to where you came from. There’s no extra page. If you did set something aside, a confirmation page opens first, and you decide there whether to delete those photos or keep them.
Why it works this way. A summary page only earns its place when there is a decision on it. With nothing set aside there is nothing to decide, so showing a page would only be one more tap between you and where you were.
The hint strip at the top shows once per round, and never on screenshots
What it does. The strip that teaches “Pinch to see the day”, “Swipe up to favorite” and “Screenshot to make a card” appears once per round of Review. It waits 1 second after the photo is actually on the card, then stays for 2 seconds and fades out. It doesn’t appear on screenshots or screen recordings, and it isn’t shown when you start Review from More ways to tidy.
Why it works this way. Teaching you the gestures on the first card is a lesson; showing it on every card would be a nag. It is counted for each round and not saved, so the next round teaches once more. Screenshots are left out for two reasons. The strip has a band only 22 points high, and a tall screenshot squeezes the words until they’re unreadable. And the strip invites you to favorite or make a card from a photo that matters to you, which is the wrong invitation to make on a screenshot.
Several look-alike photos? A short “handle the whole group” shortcut shows up
What it does. When the card you’re on has near-identical photos from the same day (or the same week, if the day has none), a small shortcut to handle the whole group appears for 3 seconds. Exact duplicates are checked before look-alikes. Videos and screenshots don’t take part.
Why it works this way. Swiping through several near-identical shots one by one makes it look as if the app keeps pushing the same photo at you. The check starts the moment the card appears, with no waiting, because swiping is fast and any delay would cancel the check on one card after another. It compares at most 48 candidates at a time: decoding several hundred photos from one day would spoil how swiping feels. The shortcut stays only briefly so it doesn’t cover the photo for long, and the next look-alike gets its own 3 seconds. Videos and screenshots are skipped because their “similar” is usually on purpose.
In random order, photos from one burst don’t show up back to back
What it does. When Review is in random order, photos from the same burst are spread apart so they don’t appear one after another. No photo is dropped; only the order changes. In time order, nothing is spread.
Why it works this way. Running into several nearly identical photos in a row, just when you open a new version, looks as if something is broken. Spreading them out loses nothing: every card is still there. In time order the timeline itself is what you asked for, so only random order spreads them.
Why can I choose how strong a swipe is?
Swipe strength has three levels, and you try each before you choose
What it does. At first launch, you swipe three cards at each of Light, Standard and Firm, then pick one. You can change it later in settings. The level only applies to the three deciding gestures: keep, set aside and swipe up to favorite. The other gestures aren’t affected: swiping down to the quick actions row, pinching to see the day, and double-tapping to zoom each keep their own thresholds.
Why it works this way. It’s three levels and not a slider because distance and angle have to be tuned together. When the swipe distance is cut short, the arc your thumb draws is more likely to light the favorite stamp. During development, on a real iPhone, cutting the distance from 89 to 61 points made one “set aside” swipe flash the favorite heart the whole way. A slider would move only one of the two, and you would have no way to know why favorites began to compete with your swipes. So each level is a set of values already tuned together, and you choose an intent, easier or less accidental, and not a number. Light is the level suggested at first, and you still tap your own choice.
If swipes keep missing or keep being undone, PicWay offers the other level
What it does. If three cards in a row don’t register (the card follows your finger and springs back), PicWay asks “Swipes not registering?” and offers to switch to Light. If three swipes in a row get undone after they land, it asks “Undoing a lot?” and offers Firm. One successful swipe resets the count.
Why it works this way. The two symptoms point to opposite levels, so they never share one reminder. It counts three in a row, not a running total, because an earlier version that kept a running total never reset, and the reminder came back on every card. Three is the smallest number that says it isn’t chance: one is a slip, two might be a photo you’re unsure about.
What happens when I tap a widget?
On This Day widget: the photo you tap is the first one in Review
What it does. Tap the photo on the On This Day widget and Review opens with that exact photo first, followed by other photos to make up a set of 8. If that photo has since been deleted, set aside or skipped, PicWay never slips in a different one in its place. If the widget’s link has gone stale and can’t be matched to any photo, you land in the regular On This Day instead.
Why it works this way. Before this, tapping a photo could open a set with only that one photo in it, because the queue had no undecided photos left. So after the target comes the queue of photos you haven’t decided on, then ones you kept, the longest-unseen first. It only has the one photo if there truly are no other usable photos today.
The widget cover and what opens behind it follow the same rules
What it does. The On This Day cover is picked from photos you haven’t decided on. If there are none, it uses photos you kept, the longest-unseen first. Photos you set aside, skipped, or that are waiting to be deleted never go on the Home Screen. Screenshots don’t go on it, and Live Photos come first.
Why it works this way. There was a time when the cover came up empty while tapping it opened a full set of photos. The cover only counted photos you hadn’t decided on, and on that day every photo from past years had already been decided. Now the cover and the set behind it use one rule, so what you see is what you get.
Random Review widget: the photo you tap goes to the top of the deck
What it does. Tap the Random Review widget and the cover photo is the first card of the deck. If that photo can’t be shown any more (deleted, access taken away, set aside or skipped), PicWay deals a fresh random deck.
Why it works this way. If it can’t show what you tapped, the next best answer is still a deck. The alternative, “nothing happens, you stay on the Home Screen”, would make a tap on a widget feel broken. The photo you tapped counts as asked for, so the rule that stops a recently seen photo coming back doesn’t apply to it.
Album widget: the photo you tap is the photo that opens, or you’re told why not
What it does. Tap the photo on the album widget and that very photo opens in the library viewer, not in Review. If it can’t open, PicWay tells you why, in one of five ways: the album is gone; this batch of photos has been replaced; the photo is no longer in your library; it is no longer in this album; or you set it aside.
Why it works this way. A specific photo is sitting on your Home Screen, so tapping it has to open that one. “If that one doesn’t work, open the first photo in the album” would make what is on the screen a lie, and you would never know that what you saw and what opened were different photos. The reasons are kept apart because they mean different things: “no longer in this album” means you moved it out, and lumping it with “deleted” would send you to look in Recently Deleted for a photo that was never deleted. If the screen is showing an older batch, the tap doesn’t guess with the same position in the new one, because it would open an unrelated photo.
Tap “Next photo” on the album widget without opening the app
What it does. The album widget picks a new photo from the album you chose every hour. You can also tap “Next photo” to change it yourself, and that doesn’t open the app. After you change it, the next hour carries on from where you are, not from where the schedule would have been. It keeps up to 24 photos per album and up to 8 albums at a time.
Why it works this way. A widget that pulled you into the app every time you changed a photo would defeat the point of a widget. The change counts from the photo you were looking at, and if the batch has been replaced since, it refuses, rather than skip two photos at once. More than 24 would cost time, because every photo is fetched from the library and encoded again.
The widget’s “Set aside” button is an archive box, not a bin
What it does. On the widget, the Set aside button shows an archive box icon, not a trash can.
Why it works this way. An earlier icon, a tray with a down arrow, could be mistaken for a download icon, so it was replaced. The trash can is already used where you really delete, and the same icon for both steps would make you think the photo was already deleted. An archive box says “put away for now”.
What does “Memories to skip” really skip?
Skipped photos stay out of suggestions, including your Home Screen
What it does. Photos covered by Memories to skip don’t show up in On This Day, Journeys, Moments, Tidy, reminders or widgets. You can still see them whenever you open your library or an album yourself. Photos you set aside or that are waiting to be deleted are kept off the Home Screen in the same way. A widget already on your Home Screen can be older than a rule you have just made, so a tap on a photo there is checked again.
Why it works this way. For a time the album widget didn’t apply this rule when it chose photos. The skipped photo would sit on your Home Screen for an hour, and only when you tapped it were you told you had skipped it. Now picking photos for the widget and handling the tap use one and the same function, so both sides use the same rule. The tap still checks as a last guard: a widget already on your screen can be older than a rule you just made.
Restoring a photo applies to one rule only
What it does. If you restore a photo inside one rule, it’s let through for that rule only. If another rule also skips it, it stays skipped.
Why it works this way. The exception is stored with the rule it came from and not in one global list. That way another skip rule can still skip the same photo, and restoring a photo never undoes something you decided elsewhere.
The city names and dates of a skipped photo don’t leak onto Journey cards
What it does. If skipped photos were part of a Journey, the city names and the start and end dates are worked out again from the photos that remain. If every photo in a Journey is skipped, the whole card disappears.
Why it works this way. An empty card would still show a title and dates, and that would keep telling you about the memory you asked not to see. So a skipped photo’s city and dates no longer appear on any automatic surface.
Deleting a skip rule asks first, and says what goes with it
What it does. Deleting a rule in Memories to skip asks you to confirm, and says: “Deletes this rule and its per-photo settings. Can’t be undone. Photos stay untouched.” Your photos are never deleted.
Why it works this way. On that screen, clearing the per-photo settings and restoring a whole group already asked first. Deleting a rule loses the most, since it also drops every per-photo exception inside it, yet it used to take effect with one swipe and no confirmation. The more a tap can destroy, the stronger the check in front of it should be.
More
- PicWay details: the overview has the other modules.
- Guides for the same features: look back by year or month, add photos to an album while you review, see On This Day photos, photo widget from one album, keep photos out of memories, clean up similar and burst photos.
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