Day One alternative

Hi All,
I am not really journaling, but I use Day One to capture memories through photos. I basically add a title and bunch of photos to the memory.

I am not into paying to DayOne and I don’t trust them with my data especially after the recent privacy incident where people gained access to other users’ data.

So any alternatives you would think about?

https://journey.cloud

It has free, paid, and subscription model. Not sure if they’re any more trustworthy than DayOne with your data. They use Google’s cloud storage for sync.

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You may look into trying Dyrii.

I can’t vouch for it as I’ve only briefly tried it, but there’s Diarly, which feels similar to Day One except there’s a focus on Markdown. The Mac version is on Setapp, too.

I started writing a journal two months ago.

I have been using Diarly daily since then. I am fine with the application. It works as advertised. I saw that this application was available on Setapp. I tried it on the Mac and then I bought it for iOS. I write most of my entries on my iPad. Sometimes, I use dictation to create entries on my iPhone.

I write text only and I like the markdown integration.

Diarly looks good and is regularly updated.

You could also use a notes app like FSNote ($4 Mac, $3 iOS), SnipNotes ($5 Mac, $3 iOS), or for something more heavy-duty there’s Keep It (Mac/iOS), Notebooksapp.com (Mac/iOS), and EagleFiler (Mac only). (Sadly, Devon Technologies dropped their low-end, inexpensive DEVONnote app, and DEVONthink starts at $99).

You could probably just use Apple Notes unless you wanted something specific out the user interface? You could create a “my journal” folder in notes to keep it segregated if you use notes for other purposes. Each entry would be a new note within that folder, type a title and drop in a few photos.

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Yep, same here. Call me crazy but Notes works perfectly fine for me. :smile: I have a dedicated folder and add a note for every day I journal. There I have everything I could wish for: no additional cost, a sync solution I trust, I can throw everything in there including photos… plus with iOS13 I can benefit from dictation. No need for a 3rd party app for me. :blush:

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I use Apple Notes as well with a Siri shortcut that gets my location and the weather. Apple Notes especially in iOS 13 is going to give a lot of these special-use subscription apps a tough time. It solves many of the remaining problems.

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I use Trello. I can quickly and easily make a card for each day. I take a photo and make it the cover. I can though any kind of attachments into the day and write as many comments (journal notes) as I like. This is the first time I have been able to keep a journal ever. Trello did it for me with its ease of use. I have a gold account ($45/yr.) though I don’t think you need this to keep a journal. I am learning to love Trello a lot mostly because of its ease of use and the way you can do anything (pretty much) with it.

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In your Trello journaling, do you keep all cards in one list or do you have separate lists for months/weeks/years? Or something else entirely?

You can print Trello boards, or you can export to CSV or JSON formats. That can makes things pretty tricky if you’re using it primarily for photos and want to export later. Trello is a great service, but I am not sure I’d use it as a long-term archive/replacement for a daily Day One photo journal.

For free daily albums online that are just photos and a title I’d consider Google Photos or private Pinterest boards. But OneNote and Apple Notes are good options and both of those are more appropriate if you want to write more that a few words to associate with a group of pictures.

For a simple file-a-day pics-plus-a-few-words I’d gravitate to first trying folders + files inside Apple Notes.

At this time, I have a board called Journal, a list for each month, and then a card for each day. The only negative side is that you have to scroll down once you get deep into the month, as in July with 31 days. But this is no big deal.

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Thanks for this info. The photos I put in the journal are also in my Photos library (backed up in several places and in several media). What I really like about Trello is the way you can easily make one photo the cover for that day. I should say that I have tried DayOne and other tools for journaling. Trello is the only electronic one that has me coming back.

I’ve been using Journey for many years now. I switched from Day One as I didnt like their UI, and was getting annoyed with the pricing scale. Im all for subscriptions, but it wasnt working for me. I went to Jouney and have been very happy. Good UI, nice and clean and simple, but has some power to it as well. And I paid for the one time purchase to get a few extras like dark mode and things like that. I do not subscribe to their Cloud service, and have been happy with the Google Drive integration.