A private memory journal

Each memory a tile. Together, a portrait of you.

A quiet place for the things worth remembering. Soft by design, stored only in your iCloud, opened with your face.

Coming to iOS & Mac See the chapters

iOS 17+ macOS 14+ text-only, v1

Tessera is a small app for a long practice. Write freely, file later. Build a library of moments — exact-dated or just the feeling of a year — and let them gather quietly into the shape of a life. No scoring. No streaks. No cheering from the margins. Only the pages you choose to keep, and the slow, honest portrait they become.

from Little Lumen Labs

the chapters

What it does, quietly.

Four ideas, arranged like a table of contents. Nothing clever. Nothing loud.

I. the blank page

Write freely.
File later.

A single tap opens a blank page. No era, no tags, no mood required — just a cursor, waiting. When you're done, the memory drops into your inbox until you decide where it belongs.

The first tile.

9:06

title…

The morning she taught me to tell a green tomato from a red one, standing in the backyard in her blue cardigan

autosaving Save to Inbox

II. eras

Chapters of a life.

Eras are the autobiographical chapters only you can name. "Childhood" can hold "Pittsburgh years," which can hold "Before my parents divorced." Each era keeps its own count and a quiet mood distribution at a glance.

Therapy is era-oriented. So is the app.

eras

  • ▾ Childhood 142
  • ▾ Pittsburgh years 88
  • ▾ Before my parents divorced 31
  • ▾ College 67
  • ▾ First marriage 94
  • ▾ Now 21

III. tags, mood, flags

The quiet apparatus.

Tags are nested and cross-cutting — family/mom/advice is three linked threads. Mood is a single soft five-point scale. Two flags, no more: core for the ones that anchor you, in progress for the ones you want to return to.

tags

family family/mom family/mom/advice kitchen pittsburgh tomatoes + add a tag

mood

Joyful Warm Neutral Heavy Painful

flags

  • Core memory anchors you
  • In progress come back to

IV. dates

Four ways to remember when.

Not every memory has a Wednesday attached. Choose exact, approximate, a whole era, or no date at all — your timeline respects the difference.

  • exact March 14, 2024 pinned to the day
  • approximate circa 2003 grouped by year
  • era-only sometime in childhood placed by chapter
  • undated — still remembered

the portrait tab

The shape of what you've kept.

Soft, quiet visualizations of the collection you are building. More like an infographic in a literary magazine than a dashboard.

memories

324

in sixteen months of writing

words written

41,208

about a short novel

oldest memory

1988

a summer on the porch

newest memory

today

six minutes ago

across your eras

  • Childhood 142
  • College 67
  • First marriage 94
  • Now 21

how it felt

  • Warm38%
  • Joyful24%
  • Neutral18%
  • Heavy12%
  • Painful8%

when you wrote

less more

what comes up

mother kitchen home tomatoes light summer window afternoon letter porch snow rain cardigan

often together

  • family/mom + advice 4×
  • kitchen + tomatoes 3×
  • pittsburgh + summer 3×

When you open Portrait after three months of writing, the feeling is not "progress." The feeling is: huh. there's a shape here.

Private by design.

No accounts, no servers, no analytics, no newsletters. Your memories live in your iCloud private database, opened with your face, your fingerprint, or your passcode. Nothing leaves your devices.

  • sync Your iCloud, your pace. Encrypted end-to-end — same as your health data.
  • lock Face ID on by default. Timeout the way you prefer, or set to Never.
  • export Every memory to a Markdown folder. Whenever you'd like. No questions.
  • ownership Your writing is yours. It is never read, indexed, or trained upon.

soon

Each memory a tile. Together, a portrait of you.

Arriving quietly, for iOS 17+ and macOS 14+.