Why I built TinyTakes
The story of a parent, thousands of unsorted photos and videos, and an app that finally made sense of it all.
The story of a parent, thousands of unsorted photos and videos, and an app that finally made sense of it all.
If you're a parent, you know the drill. Your phone is full of photos and videos of your kids - thousands of them. First steps, messy meals, silly dances, quiet moments on the couch. They're all in there somewhere.
But "somewhere" is the problem. They're buried in your camera roll between screenshots of grocery lists and videos from school plays you don't have time to rewatch. You took them because those moments mattered. But you never have time to go back and find them.
I lived this frustration for months. Every few weeks I'd think, "I should really organize these." I'd open my Photos app, scroll for a while, get interrupted by my toddler, and put away my phone. Sound familiar?
When my child was born, I made myself a promise: I'd put together a short highlight video for the first couple of weeks, and then one for every month after that. A little time capsule of all the moments that mattered.
The reality was harder than I expected. Every time a new month rolled around, I'd sit down to curate the photos and videos I wanted to use. Then I'd open a movie editor on my phone, import everything, and quickly realize that using all the footage would create a 30-minute montage. So I'd have to watch each and every clip, decide what to keep, trim the rest, and piece it all together.
It took hours. Hours on my phone that I could have spent with my kid or catching up on desperately needed sleep.
I was spending more time editing memories than making new ones.
That's when it clicked. I have a background in machine learning and a passion for video creation and personalization. What if I could combine the two? What if an app could watch all those clips for me, understand what was happening in each one, and help me quickly select just the moments that mattered?
One night in January 2026, while my toddler was fast asleep, I started building.
TinyTakes uses on-device AI to watch your videos and look at your photos the way you would. It detects 14 distinct actions like walking, crawling, playing, eating, and laughing. Then it lets you turn those tagged moments into beautiful highlight reels with transitions, music, and captions.
The key word there is "on-device." Everything happens on your iPhone. Your photos and videos never leave your phone. No cloud uploads. No internet required. No one sees your family's moments except you.
I built it this way on purpose.
I had one non-negotiable rule: my photos and videos would never touch a server. Not mine, not anyone's. This wasn't a business decision. It was a parenting decision.
The tech industry has normalized uploading our most personal moments to the cloud. I chose not to to build another app that asks you to trust a company with your media.
All AI models run entirely on your iPhone. Nothing is sent anywhere.
TinyTakes works in airplane mode. Your data stays yours.
No tracking, no third-party SDKs, no usage data collection.
TinyTakes is available now on the App Store for iOS.