"On this day" memories: how to hide or turn them off in Apple Photos and Google Photos, and why looking back helps
You pick up your phone in the morning and there it is: a beach six summers ago, a friend's wedding, your child at four. For a minute the day feels different. Then one morning it is a photo of someone who is no longer in your life, and the minute feels very different.
Both reactions are common. As one Popular Science guide put it: "Maybe you've been through a painful break-up, or a loved one passed away, and even though you don't want to delete these images, you don't want them popping up on your screen without warning."
Below: what research says about looking back, where the memory features live and how to hide or switch them off, and how to choose what comes back.
Why looking back can help
The research is encouraging, though modest.
- Remembering good moments can lift your mood. In a field experiment by Bryant, Smart and King (2005), students who spent ten minutes twice a day for a week recalling pleasant memories reported a larger rise in how much of the time they felt happy than students who thought about current concerns. One detail is worth knowing: the group that recalled the memories in their own mind gained more than the group that looked at mementos.
- Nostalgia tends to connect rather than isolate. In a series of seven studies, Wildschut and colleagues (2006) found that nostalgic memories usually feature close people or big events like weddings, and that nostalgia "bolsters social bonds, increases positive self-regard, and generates positive affect".
- What we go back to, we tend to keep. The psychologist Gert Storms tested his memory of 2,691 diary notes written over 24 years. He remembered less than two thirds of the events, and on average misdated them by about a year and a half. The best predictor of what he remembered was how often he had gone back to an event, by talking or thinking about it.
- Hard feelings often soften with time. Studies of the fading affect bias show that the feeling attached to unpleasant events usually fades faster than the feeling attached to pleasant ones. That is a tendency, not a rule: the same review notes that it can break down in people whose mood is low.
Two honest limits. These are small studies, mostly with students or a single person, and they show tendencies, not guarantees. And a reminder doesn't always change anything: a psychologist who tested herself with six years of Timehop reminders found that photos brought memories back more readily than text, but that remembering "had little influence on ongoing affect, cognition, and behaviour". Looking back can be pleasant and useful. It isn't a treatment.
Why platform memories sometimes hurt
A photo library or a social media history isn't a record of your life. It holds whatever you happened to photograph or post: the ex, the hospital corridor, the house you had to sell. An algorithm picks from that pile and puts it on your screen at a time you didn't choose.
Facebook's engineers have written about the problem themselves: "Things that might have been meaningful or pleasant when they were first posted can turn into unpleasant or less important memories over time." In 2014 the web designer Eric Meyer described how Facebook's Year in Review showed him a photo of his daughter, who had died that year, under a cheerful heading. He called it "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty".
The companies have added controls since then. Here is where they are.
Apple Photos (iPhone and iPad)
Apple describes Memories as collections that feature a significant person, pet, place, activity or event, so they are not strictly tied to today's date. To find them, open Photos, tap Collections, then swipe through Memories or tap Memories to see them all.
From Apple's iPhone User Guide:
- Show a person less, or never. Open a photo of the person, tap the More button, then tap Don't Feature a Person. Choose Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person, then tap Confirm. To undo it, tap Collections, tap your account in the top-right corner, then tap Reset People & Pets Suggestions.
- Show a day or place less. In Collections, touch and hold a memory, tap Feature Less, then, depending on the memory, choose Feature This Day Less, Feature This Place Less or Feature This Person Less (Apple's Personal Safety guide).
- Turn memories off. Tap Collections, tap your account in the top-right corner, and turn off Show Featured Content. Turning off Show Holiday Events stops memories built around holidays.
Google Photos (Android and iPhone)
Featured memories appear at the top of the Photos tab. All the controls are in one place, according to Google's help page: tap your profile photo or initial, then Photos settings (Google Photos settings on iPhone), then Preferences, then Memories.
- Hide faces. Choose "Show less" (you won't get memories about them, but they may still appear in group photos) or "Blocked" (they won't appear in memories at all). Google notes that face hiding may not work perfectly in all photos.
- Hide dates. Add the dates you never want to see in featured memories. You can also do it from a memory itself: tap More, then Hide, then Hide this date from all memories.
- Turn memories off. Under Memory types, turn off Time-based memories and Themed memories, then turn off all the types under Creations.
- Keep memories, stop the alerts. Under Notifications, switch off the types you don't want to hear about.
Facebook's own On This Day shows content from this date in the past: your posts, photos and posts you were tagged in. All your memories are gathered on one page, facebook.com/memories.
In 2016 its engineers wrote that Facebook automatically filtered out memories with exes or people who are blocked, and built preferences that let you block specific people or dates. When On This Day launched, notifications were chosen on that page too, so start there. Facebook changes its menus often, and we couldn't confirm today's exact path on its own help pages, so we won't send you clicking through steps that may have moved.
OneDrive
If your phone backs up photos to Microsoft OneDrive, it may send "On this day" notifications and emails. Microsoft's instructions: in the app, tap your profile picture, then Settings, then Notifications, and switch off "On this day" or "I have memories from this day". For the emails, sign in at onedrive.live.com, go to Settings, then Photos, uncheck the boxes and select Save.
Choosing what comes back
Switching memories off is a reasonable choice. If you keep them, a few habits help:
- Where the app lets you (Google Photos, Lifeline), add the hard dates in advance. The anniversary of a death or a breakup comes every year. Apple only offers Feature This Day Less on a memory it has already shown.
- Hide people, don't delete them. Apple and Google let you keep the photos and still stop someone from being featured (Facebook too, by its engineers' 2016 account).
- Look back when you choose. In the Bryant study, reminiscing was deliberate. You can turn the notifications off and still open the memories when you want them.
How On this day works in Lifeline
Lifeline is a private timeline of the moments that shaped you, and it approaches looking back the other way round. It doesn't look through your camera roll. It brings back only memories you wrote down yourself, because they mattered. (Why that is worth doing, and what to keep, is in our guide to a digital time capsule.)
- Where. When something happened on today's date in an earlier year, the main screen shows "On this day" with the year, and the line moves to that memory once a day when you open the app.
- A morning reminder, if you want one. It is off until you turn it on: Profile → Reminders → On this day (with Notifications on). The notification shows how many years ago it was and the memory's title, but never the title of a locked memory: lock screens are public.
- Sad memories stay quiet if you like. Turn off "Bring back sad memories" and moments whose main emotion you set to sadness, fear, anger or disgust won't come back on their own. The emotion is the one you chose, not a guess from a face in a photo.
- "Don't remind me of this." Any memory, from its menu. It stays on your line and in search; it just won't come back by itself. "Remind me of this again" undoes it.
- Quiet dates. Pick the days of the year when nothing should come back: no On this day and no notification. The app's own words: "For the days that hurt."
To be clear about the limits: Lifeline has no people tags, so there is no way to hide a person across all memories. You hide memories one by one, by emotion or by date. And a memory comes back on the date you gave it, so if you only know the month, it will return on whichever day you picked.
Questions people ask
How do I find On this day memories on Facebook?
Go to facebook.com/memories. Facebook describes On This Day as content from this date in the past: your posts, photos and posts you were tagged in.
Can I turn off Google Photos memories without deleting any photos?
Yes. Turning off memory types, hiding faces or hiding dates only changes what appears in the featured memories carousel. Your photos stay where they are.
Does Apple Photos have an "On this day" section?
Apple's guide doesn't describe a separate dated section: it describes Memories as collections around a person, pet, place, activity or event. To see fewer memories about one day, touch and hold the memory and tap Feature Less; depending on the memory, you can then choose Feature This Day Less.
Looking back is one of the quiet pleasures of keeping a record of your life. It works best when you decide what is in the record, and when it comes back.