A visual memory instrument
Enter your photo archive as a world.
SigilAtlas turns a lifetime of photographs into an atlas — a stable map of everything you photographed. Say what you remember and the photographs that answer it gather. The same phrase takes a different shape in every archive, because every archive records a different life of attention.
Local-first · private by default · nothing leaves your machine unless you publish it
Both apps are in beta · the network is by invitation — where things stand
A collection of photographs is a record of attention. Mine holds what I noticed: every photograph framed on purpose, the whole accumulated without a plan. I type a phrase and see the shape it takes in my archive. SigilAtlas is an instrument for re-experiencing memory — and for sharing it, so someone else can see what I paid attention to. It makes photographs findable — it does not edit or organize them.
The instrument has four modes — things a person does with memory. All four are shown below on one archive — mine.
Say what you remember — a name, a place, a color, a feeling — and the photographs that answer gather on the map. I name two people — @mama and @papa — and turn relevance all the way up: only the photographs with them remain — decades of them, in one view. Any named person can be summoned the same way.
The same photographs read again as a sequence: a timeline, ordered by capture and wrapped into strips. Photographs taken together may look alike, and when they do, an event shows as a visible run — a walk, a party, an afternoon, found by eye — and plays back frame by frame as you shot it.
The same archive, read as time — every photograph in one order, warm light to cool.
Photographs close together in time form a story. The wall plays every story in the current range at once, each one looping. The timeline below sets the range, and the range sets what counts as close: a year in view makes stories about a day long; a day in view, minutes long. Double-click a story to drill in — it breaks into the finer stories inside it.
Drop meaning for a moment and work with the pixels: compose new images from your own photographs. Up close, every tile is a real photograph. Far out, no single photo matters; the structure only appears when thousands are seen at once. At that distance the archive works as a medium: a phrase, the place on the map where it lands, and the pattern the photographs form there — a word painting.
Every grain of this image is a photograph — my archive, seen from far enough away to work as a medium.
Every photograph acts as a pixel: take more and the map grows finer — more to find, in sharper detail. Photograph a moment more often and its timeline gains frame rate — smoother motion to replay.
The more you photograph, the sharper your atlas — finer in space, finer in time.
The studio — desktop
Free while in beta. Your archive lives here, and stays yours — the four verbs, worked in full: find, remember, experience, create. Save any view as a narrative; export it as a movie. A resident guide can work the instrument for you and teach you by showing. When something’s ready, publish it — your whole archive or a slice — to the web.
The field — web
The public, immediate form. Type, and regions form; read the patterns the photographs make. Invite a friend into your world — they see what you paid attention to, and can zoom past the pixels to the photographs themselves. Publish a gallery and it joins the commons — a shared field built from everyone’s contributed pixels.
Every archive records one experienced world. When two overlap — the same people, places, or events seen from different sides — SigilAtlas shows the overlap as a path between points of view. The public sees the shared field; going deeper is by invitation.
A memory instrument and an image instrument — phrases reshaping the field; photographs working as a medium; the moments that made them, played back again.