My Apple Photos library had grown to more than twelve thousand photos. I knew plenty of them could go, but every time I thought about cleaning them up, the same question stopped me: where do I even start?
The whole library felt like too much to take on at once. I did not need a faster way to sort thousands of photos. I needed a smaller place to start.
One day is enough
I wondered what would happen if I reviewed one date at a time.
Each day, Mira shows me the photos taken on that date throughout the years. I only have to look at one small part of my library, decide what I want to keep, and clean up the rest.
The next day, I do it again.
After a year, I will have had the chance to review every date in my library. What once felt like an endless project is now something I can make progress on every day.
I built it for myself first
I originally built Mira for my own photo library. I wanted a focused tool that would help me make progress without making photo cleanup feel like another chore.
When I shared Mira with family and friends, it resonated with them too. Their libraries had also grown over the years, and they wanted a way to work through them without doing everything at once.
That was when I decided to turn Mira into an app for other people.
The part I did not expect
I expected Mira to help me clean up my library. I did not expect how often it would bring old memories back into my life.
I would find a photo I had forgotten, show it to my wife, and we would start talking about what was happening that day. She would do the same with the photos she found.
We have a young child, so those daily glimpses into the past feel especially meaningful. Seeing how much our child has grown through ordinary moments across the years has become one of my favorite parts of using Mira.
That was not why I started Mira, but it has become just as important as cleanup.
A calmer relationship with our photos
I believe software should bring a little more peace into people's lives. Our photo libraries hold meaningful memories, but their size can make them stressful to manage.
Mira is my attempt to change that. It gives people a manageable way to care for their photo libraries while spending time with the memories inside them.
That is why I built Mira.