To My Future Self

Description

To My Future Self is an AI time-gift generator, and the whole thing is a single HTML file: double-click to run, no dependencies, works offline, and no photos are uploaded by default. It does one thing: turn a pile of casual photos into a gift you can send to the future. The author made it for their future self, and for everyone who is moving forward and deserves to be treated gently by themselves.

Once you import photos, it does two things to each one: sorts it and reads it. There are only two categories, landscapes and people & daily life. The app makes a first local guess from the share of skin tones, sky and greenery in the frame, warm-color saturation and clues in the file name; if you enter your own API key, a multimodal model makes the call and overrides it, and the interface always shows whether each label is an "AI call" or a "local call". To read a photo, it takes the capture time and GPS coordinates from the EXIF data and works out the season and time of day; when it can't, it honestly writes "roughly" next to it instead of making up a precise time.

Then it counts, and the number decides the shape of the gift:

• Exactly 9: bound into a nine-grid stamp album. By default each photo becomes a collage card: the photo stays as it is, with a strip of warm white paper below, a seal colored from the photo's main hue pressed into the corner, and small typewriter text in English. A toggle at the top switches to a collector's stamp style with perforations, a postmark and an embossed date, and the choice is remembered.
• More than 9: grows into a memoir with timeline and page-turning modes, sections by year with yearly summaries, landscapes cropped to cinematic 16:9 as yearly covers, and landscapes and portraits from the same day grouped together automatically.
• Fewer than 9: shown as a small set, with a note telling you how many more you need.

The last step is the time capsule: write 100 characters to your future self and choose a date to open it. Until then, the whole album is covered by an envelope, showing only the cover and your note; open the page on that day and it unseals itself. You can seal several capsules at once, and edit, open early or delete each one.

Technically, it is deliberately small: stamps, collage cards and yearly covers are all rendered live with front-end Canvas, with no image-generation model involved, and recognition and rendering results are saved together in IndexedDB, so they are still there when you reopen the page. The whole album exports as a 2K long image or a PDF layout, and the layout is adapted for mobile. Privacy is part of the design: photos and recognition results stay on the device, and images are sent only to an endpoint you configure yourself, and only if you enter your own key. The app was built from scratch during the hackathon; before that, there was only the idea.