One photo a day of your little one, shared with your partner and the grandparents. It lives in your own iCloud. No accounts. No ads. No server.
No accounts No ads No server Free with optional Plus
Each day gets one photo, so every one counts. It lands in the feed as a polaroid, captioned in your handwriting and dated with their age. Around it, add all the notes, milestones, songs, places, videos, and voice notes you like.
Every memory appears on both parents' phones, moments after it's made. The small hours are long, but the little years are short. This app helps you keep them.
All of this is free. No upsells, no locked features, no algorithm.
The same journal and the same iCloud, on the bigger screen. The photo grid opens out into a whole wall of the year, and the artwork gallery hangs three across. One app, one purchase, both devices.
One photo a day per child: a polaroid with a handwritten caption and their exact age.
First smile, first step, first word. Stamped into the timeline and celebrated properly.
Tag the beach, grandma's house, or the song you danced to before nap. Maps and music, right on the memory.
A giggle, a babble, a bedtime song. Short clips and recordings, right in the journal, and a voice note writes out what was said.
Any memory becomes a polaroid card or a little video clip, signed in ink and ready for the family chat.
This day one week, one month, one year ago: a fresh look-back at the top of the feed each day.
Whole months play back like little films. Export them as real videos to keep and share.
Weight and height charted over time. Journal stats, streaks, and every day at a glance.
Each child gets their own photo-a-day and age labels. Tag any memory to one child or all of them.
Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, a Control Center quick-add, and an optional daily reminder.
Send a photo straight from the share sheet. It lands on today, ready for its caption.
Notes, places, songs, people, and the words inside a voice note: the whole journal, one search bar away.
The journal can ask for Face ID every time it opens.
New photos are stored in HEIC, about a third smaller. The journal stays light on your iCloud storage.
Export every photo, video, note, and chart as one zip of real files, anytime.
Warm in the daylight, gentle at 3 AM. Scroll through, or use the arrows.
Grandparents, aunties, and godparents get their own little app: a feed where memories hang from fridge magnets. You choose which memories go up. They see only those, and all they can do is love them.
When Nana hearts a photo, it lands right back on your memory with a little burst. No accounts for them to create, either. They tap a link, and they're in.
It works both ways, too: when your sister sends her family's Fridge link, it opens right inside your own journal. Her kids show up in your feed, and both journals stay separate.
There's a Photo Frame as well. The whole Fridge, full screen, one picture at a time, changing slowly. Leave an iPad on the kitchen worktop and it turns into a frame that fills itself.
Your journal lives in your own iCloud, synced by the same Apple infrastructure that carries Photos and Notes. We couldn't read your memories if we wanted to. And we don't want to.
No Small Hours account exists. Your journal is tied to your Apple account, on your storage.
Encrypted in transit and at rest; notes end-to-end. With Advanced Data Protection, your photos too.
No ads, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. The App Store label reads "Data Not Collected."
One tap exports the entire journal as ordinary files. Leaving is easy. That's the point.
Plus.
Keeping the journal is free and always will be. Plus adds the keepsakes: the things that turn two years of photos into a book you can hold and a film you can watch.
A whole year typeset as a real book: polaroid pages, handwritten captions, a cover with their name. Print it at home or have it bound.
Every drawing they brought home, bound into a real book. Each one framed under the title they gave it.
The year's most-loved moments as a little film with chapters. Twelve months in one sitting.
The same little face months apart, side by side.
New looks for the whole journal, from the paper to the handwriting.
Their measurements drawn on the real WHO percentile curves between checkups.
Photos, videos, notes, milestones, places, songs, scanning their artwork, the Fridge, sharing, export. Plus only ever adds.
One purchase covers the whole family through Family Sharing, so two parents never pay twice. Grandparents and viewers never see a price at all. Only the person keeping the journal is ever asked.
The journal is free: photos, videos, notes, milestones, places, songs, voice notes, scanning their artwork, the Fridge, sharing with your partner and the grandparents, search, and export. None of it is capped or will ever move behind a paywall.
Small Hours Plus ($12.99/year with a free first week, or $34.99 once) adds the keepsakes on top: the Year Book, the Artwork Book, Year in Review, Then & Now, themes, and growth curves. Only the person keeping the journal is ever asked. Viewers and grandparents never see a price. There's also a tip jar in Settings, which unlocks nothing and never will.
In your own iCloud account, in a private database only your devices can read. There is no Small Hours server and no account to create. We never see your memories, and they count against your iCloud storage just like Photos or Notes. New photos are stored as HEIC, about a third smaller than typical JPEGs, so even a full year doesn't take much space.
You send one link. When your partner taps it, the whole journal appears on their phone. From then on every memory lands on both phones: posts, edits, hearts, everything.
Only what you put on the Fridge. It's a separate, curated feed. They tap an invite link, see the memories you chose, and can heart them. They can't post, edit, or see anything else.
Small Hours runs on iPhone and iPad, on iOS 26 or later. It's one app and one journal: buy nothing twice, and everything you write on one shows up on the other. It needs an iCloud account, since that's where your journal lives. Fridge viewers need the same.
Always. Settings → Export All Data produces one zip with every photo, video, note, location, song, voice note, and the growth log as ordinary files.
Free for iPhone on iOS 26. There's no account to make, so the first photo is about ninety seconds away.
