Choose a point of view before a date range
“My year” is a valid archive label, but it is not yet an editorial idea. Decide what changed, repeated, or became newly important. The year everyone moved closer, the year of weekend trains, the year built around one house, or the year a hobby became a ritual gives the selection a point of view.
If no thread spans all twelve months, make a recap of the strongest season instead. A smaller chapter that feels specific is more memorable than a complete chronology that feels generic.
Reduce the roll in two passes
A full year can contain thousands of images. In the first pass, create monthly or seasonal shortlists without worrying about the final count. In the second, combine those lists and remove frames that do the same job. Keep the strongest evidence, not an equal quota from every month.
For a Memento, the final selection must contain 50–150 eligible photos. That limit is useful: it forces the year to become an edit. Around 100 images gives room for recurring patterns and multiple visual registers while still staying coherent.
- Pass one: collect the moments that belong to the chosen thread.
- Pass two: remove weak duplicates and unrelated highlights.
- Protect range across people, place, action, detail, and transition.
- Keep uneven months when the year itself was uneven.
Look for change and recurrence
A year recap becomes a story when it can show both what stayed and what changed. The same room in different seasons, a recurring group photographed in new places, an object that keeps reappearing, or a route seen under different light can connect distant months without invented narration.
Change does not need to be dramatic. Different coats by the same doorway or a table slowly filling with new objects can carry more truth than a generic declaration that everything changed.
Do not turn the year into a scoreboard
Counts can be delightful when they are computed and visually earned, but a recap made only of totals becomes a dashboard. Use numbers as one form of evidence beside photographs, recurring motifs, visual comparisons, and emotional pacing.
Memento permits exact numerical claims only when they come from deterministic evidence. It does not guess relationships, personality traits, private context, or precise life facts merely because a model could phrase them confidently.
Leave private milestones private
A camera roll often records documents, medical moments, financial information, home details, private conversations, and other evidence that was never meant to become a public yearbook. Exclude those images during selection. A recap can acknowledge a changing life without exposing the source material that proves it.
Before sharing, review the final cards for the comfort of everyone shown. Public postability is a higher standard than technical accuracy: the artifact should be true, generous, and safe outside its original context.
Choose an ending that changes the opening
The last photo of December is not automatically the right closer. Look for a late image that makes an earlier frame mean something new: returning to the first place, repeating a pose without staging it, seeing the same people under different circumstances, or finding quiet after a visually loud year.
A strong ending makes the viewer want to start again from card one. That circular feeling is what separates a finished recap from a chronological dump.