Day One and Google Photos are taunting me

Technically it’s our daughter’s spring break this week. It’s not really a vacation, though. She doesn’t actually have classes, but with AP exams approaching she still has plenty of homework. And it’s not like we can actually go anywhere. But in prior years this week has commonly been one where we’ve taken family vacations.

I typically take photos on vacations to remember them, and for awhile now I’ve been using Day One to capture thoughts and experiences from those vacations. Awhile back I uploaded lots of our vacation photos to Google Photos, so that we could have our Google Home Hub display a rotating carousel of those images. Normally I like that both services remind me of previous photos or journal entries: it’s a chance to be reminded of a fond memory. Now that we’re all trapped at home for an extended period of time, those reminders are a little painful.

Remember last year, when you were in the San Juan islands and Victoria? How about this trip to Joshua Tree? Yosemite? The trips to wide open spaces seem particularly painful now. Why yes, I do remember hiking through Yosemite and think it’d be awesome to be wandering through the meadows right now (well, ok, except for the increase in bears casually wandering around). Except, oh yeah, the park is closed. Joshua Tree? Closed. Pretty much every place we’ve spent spring break in the past is now closed (and even if it weren’t, it’d be hard to get there).

And yet the reminders go on. Daily, because the software isn’t smart enough to realize that the individual entries actually belong to larger events. So for the past week I’ve been treat to daily tauntings of when we could go out and enjoy ourselves as a family. Sometimes our “intelligent” software? Not so intelligent.