Everyone you have,
drawn through time.
A family tree tells you how people are related. It cannot tell you that your grandmother and your daughter missed each other by four years. Worldlines draws each person as a line through the century, and a photograph is the place two lines touch.
- One line for each person your family has named
- A line begins the year that person was born
- A circle is a photograph: two lines in one room
- Drag the plane and watch the century fill in
What is a worldline?
One person, drawn as a single line running through time. It begins the year they were born and carries on through every year they lived. Nothing more complicated than that.
What it buys you is the crossings. Where two lines touch, those two people were photographed together, so a photograph stops being a file with a date attached and becomes the moment two lives met. Sweep the plane forward and you watch a family assemble itself: a line begins, runs alone for a while, and then starts meeting others.
It is the same collection you already have. Timeline lays it out by year, and Worldlines lays out the people inside those years.
How is this different from a family tree?
A tree is drawn on lineage. It answers who descends from whom, and it answers it well, but it has no time axis, so two people can sit one line apart on the page having never once been in the same year.
Worldlines is built on time instead. Overlap is the first thing you see: who shared a century, who shared a room, who arrived the year after someone left. The four years by which two people missed each other are visible as a gap, and no tree can draw that gap.
What does the Timeline show that Worldlines does not?
Worldlines draws the people. The Timeline draws the years, one after another, with your photos sitting in them. It is the view you scroll when you want to walk forward through a life rather than stand back and look at the shape of one.
Two things sit alongside your own photos there. The first is the world: the year a photo was taken carries what else happened that year, so a picture from 1969 sits beside the Moon landing and one from 1964 beside the Beatles arriving in America. The second is age. Once your family has put in a birth year, the Timeline works out how old someone was in each photo, which is often the fastest way to place a picture nobody can date by eye.
Do I have to date every photograph first?
No, and this is the part that makes it work on a real shoebox. Phossil reads a date off each photograph from the picture itself, so a collection with nothing written on the back still draws. Where the evidence is thin, the photograph is held to a wide range and sits loosely on the axis; where you type in a date yourself, it is anchored and everything near it firms up. How the dating works.
What will Worldlines not do?
It draws the people it has been given. A great-aunt nobody has named is not on the plot at all, and a person whose birth year nobody has entered gets a line with no beginning. Naming faces is work your family does, and Worldlines is downstream of it.
It draws crossings from photographs, not from life. Two people who lived in the same house for forty years and were never once photographed together will not appear to touch. What you are seeing is an honest picture of your collection, which is not the same thing as a picture of your family.
And it is only as certain as the dating underneath it. A photograph held to a wide range could belong to any year in that range, so a crossing drawn from a loosely dated photograph is a likelihood rather than a fact. Anchor the date and the crossing stops moving.
Worldlines itself is still an exhibit in beta, and it says so on the page when you open it. It is in your collection and you can use it today. It is the newest thing here, and it is the one most likely to change under you.
Do I keep what I paid for?
You buy a collection once. It is not a subscription, and nothing you have paid for is taken back from you later.
Downloading your photographs is never gated and never charged, in full resolution, whatever the state of your account. See pricing.
Back to what Phossil does. The crossings come from names your family puts to faces, which is a scan away from a box of prints.