First-day-of-school photos: the doorstep series

The same doorstep, the same pose, a taller kid: the first-day series is the best longitudinal photography most families ever produce.

The idea

Every phone app is built to make you open it. Bubbles In Time is built to give the attention back: photos float past, and then they are gone until the next one.

Every year's shot in one rotation turns the series into what it wanted to be — a floating growth chart, running all year.

In practice

Bubbles In Time is the Android app this applies to — your own photos drifting over any app, on-device, $2.99 once with no subscription, no ads and no cloud.

The senior-year shot next to the kindergarten shot, arriving unprompted in February, is the whole reason this app exists.

Setting it up

Ten minutes, once: install Bubbles In Time ($2.99, one-time), pull the relevant photos from your gallery into the rotation, set a frequency that feels right, and let the floating layer do the rest. Everything stays on your device — no account, no uploads, no ads between the memories — and the pause switch is always one tap away.