Photo Sorting App: Why I Built Spohad

For ten years I looked for a photo sorting app that would let me sort from my phone, lying in bed, instead of sitting at a computer. I never found it. So I built it myself. This is the story of how a simple wish grew, over ten years, into an app.

Where did it all start?

I like putting things in order. Not a big spring clean once a year, but a quiet pleasure: pick something up, look at it, decide where it belongs, and put it there. I have always felt that way about photos. It was just never comfortable to do.

On a computer, sorting photos means “select, copy, paste,” dozens of times over. Folders sprawl, files move back and forth, because there is no rule about what lives where. The desk, the back, the mouse: it is work, not pleasure.

Ten years ago my wish was very simple: do the same thing from my phone. In the evening, in bed, with one hand. I did not picture any feed or swipes back then. I just wanted to sort my photos wherever I felt comfortable.

Why I didn’t do it sooner

Because I am not a programmer. For twenty years I built businesses and moved from Ukraine to Israel, and then to Germany. I had never once made a product you could actually touch. To make an app you needed a team of developers. The thought “I’ll build it myself” never even crossed my mind.

So I looked for something ready-made. All those years I installed anything that promised to “clean up your gallery.” Some looked similar, from a distance. I used one for years. But they were all much weaker, and something was always missing: you could not put a file into your own folder, or give it a caption, or what you sorted stayed trapped inside the app and never reached real folders.

How did the ideas pile up?

None of the ideas in Spohad today arrived all at once. The more apps I tried, the better I understood what I wanted. And every day I used other apps I love, and noticed what made them pleasant to use.

That is how the picture came together, piece by piece. Feeds of short videos showed me how easy it is to scroll one full-screen frame at a time, never knowing what comes next. My frustration with other apps grew into a wish that a file should always land in a real folder. The rest (swipe directions, the value of a frame, catalogs that live differently over time) came later, once I started building my own. I took the best of what I use myself and joined it into one thing.

A version just for me

A year ago I stopped waiting and made my own: a simple one, for myself, on a computer. I can’t write code, so I built it with AI assistants. A frame on the full screen, one move, and it is in a folder. And I was hooked. I sat for hours and sorted. One evening I cleared three and a half gigabytes of junk and saved seven hundred megabytes of photos worth keeping, sorted into little folders.

But the old problem was still there: I did not like sorting at a computer. So I mirrored the computer’s screen onto my phone and ran everything from bed.

A funny hack. But it settled everything: my ten-year wish, “from my phone, from bed,” was not a whim. This has to live in the phone. All of it.

How the real app was made

That is where work on Spohad began, more than a year ago. For the first months I did not write any code. I let the idea mature. I drew the mark: an eye with clock hands moving inside it. I chose the name. I rearranged icons on the screen until it felt like “yes, that’s right.” All of it on that same computer.

I took the name from my own language. In Ukrainian, “spohad” (спогад) means a memory. I liked how it sounded, and then I realized it is the whole point: the app does not sort files, it helps you remember them. More in the article what “spohad” means.

Then I bought a Mac and signed up for expensive subscriptions to AI coding assistants. Today, with them, one person can do what used to take a whole team. They write the code, and I am responsible for how the app looks and feels. How that works I described in “I don’t read code. I read comments”. Since then I have worked on Spohad every day, from morning to evening, and often at night.

But I didn’t want to just place orders. I studied programming from an engineering point of view: how everything works, what is connected to what, why it is done this way and not another. This whole year I have been learning by building this product. Maybe it could have been faster. But it mattered to me to finish it and to learn how to do it right.

What rule did I find?

While building, I understood why sorting at a computer is such torture: there is no rule about what goes where, or why. So I made one up.

• Everything that happened to you goes to Memories.
• Everything you need for life right now goes to Recall.
• Anything private goes to the Vault.
• And everything new first lands in Sort, which is the entrance.

The result is a feed that looks like social media, except every post in it is yours. Swipe left to send it to Memories, right to Recall, heart if you like it. Scrolling past is a decision too: the frame will come back another time. Nothing moves until you press Save. And the files land in real folders, which you can see in the Files app and on any computer.

Who I am making it for

For myself, first of all. I am Spohad’s first user and I scroll through my own archives every day.

For my wife: over twenty years of our life together she has collected five terabytes on a drive that nobody ever gets around to. That is a story of its own, “Five terabytes in twenty years”.

For my son, who is eleven, and whose childhood also lies in those terabytes.

And for everyone whose phone is full and who cannot find anything in it.

I spent ten years looking for a way to sort my photos from bed. Now there is one. Try the feed right on the home page, one frame at a time, no rush. I think you will like it.