Timeline & dates

The Timeline is a second way to move through a book — by when things happened instead of by page order. Every page can carry a date, and the timeline lays the whole book out from earliest to latest, with a chart along the top that shows where the book is rich with material and where there are gaps.

Opening the timeline

Open a book, then open the menu (the ☰ button, top right) and choose Timeline. Close it with the Close button or the Esc key — you’ll be back where you were.

The chart at the top

Each bar counts the pages dated to that time. A solid bar is pages dated precisely (to a year, month, or day); a hatched bar is pages dated more loosely (“the 1920s”) that sit at the start of their range. Empty stretches are gaps — nothing from those years — which is itself a useful nudge to go find missing photos or letters.

A gap with faint diagonal shading is a special case: no page is dated to those years, but some page’s date is loose enough to reach them — a photo marked “the 1940s” could just as well be from 1945. Hover a bar to see how many, and click it to list them.

• Click a bar to show just that slice of time below.
• Drag across bars to pick a range of years.
• Decade / Year / Month buttons change how finely the chart is grouped. Your chosen slice of time comes with you — zooming out widens it to fit (pick March 1988, switch to Decade, and you’re looking at the 1980s).
• Clear window goes back to showing the whole book.

The list below

Pages appear in date order, oldest first, each shown as a card with a thumbnail of the page and a date chip. A “3 year gap” marker appears where the dates jump. Pages with no date yet are gathered at the very end under Undated pages. Click any card (or its Open button) to read that page.

When you’ve picked a slice of time, a line may appear at the bottom of the list: “2 pages with broader dates could fall here”. Those are pages dated too loosely to belong to your slice for certain — “the 1940s” when you asked for 1945 — so they sit elsewhere on the timeline. Click the line to show or hide them.

The chip tells you where a date came from:

• Solid gold — a date a person confirmed.
• Outlined — a date inherited from a journal entry that covers the page.
• Dashed — a suggestion from the AI, waiting for someone to confirm or correct it.

Dating a page Organizer & admin

Each card has a Date button (organizers and admins only). It opens a small editor:

• On / Between — a single date, or a span between two dates.
• Year → Month → Day — fill in as much as you know and no more. The year box accepts “1920s” for a whole decade.
• The small button beside each box marks that part as approximate (≈), uncertain (?), or both — so “1912, but not sure of the month” is easy to record.

A live preview shows how the date will read. Press Save date. If a page shows an AI suggestion, opening the editor pre-fills it and shows the reasoning — press Confirm date to accept it, or adjust a box first to correct it.

Where dates come from

The AI estimates a date for each page while it reads the book (from datelines, postmarks, clothing and photo style, and the ages of people it recognizes), and a later text-only pass refines those guesses from the captions and transcripts. Journal entries with dates pass their date down to the pages they cover. A date a person sets always wins over both.

Who can do what

• Everyone can open the timeline, browse by date, and see the chips.
• Organizers and admins can set, confirm, correct, and clear dates.