I love journaling and I love Diarium. It’s a great app already, but there are some things I’d like to see to take it from great to perfect:
Multiple diaries
Many journal writers will keep several journals – personal, work, dreams, etc. There has been a lot of interest from users in this feature being added. Whilst to a certain extent you can separate entries using tags, I think many people feel the simpler approach is to have the option of being able to have completely separate journals within Diarium. Whether those would be separate files, or separate journals contained in one file (my preferred option) who knows?
Granular control in attachments view
I love the attachments view which was recently introduced. With how well Diarium handles media, it’s becoming a life photo album for me. However, currently you can only scroll through all media in complete chronological order. I would like to see more granular control. The ability to filter media by tags would mean I could bring up every photo my daughter is tagged in, or every sunset. Filtering by date would let me view all photos in a specific period. It would be awesome. Also, some sort of ‘jump to date’ function would be useful in navigating this view – especially for large journals as currently there is just one loooong scroll bar.
View media only in attachments view
Currently the attachments view will take you to the entry that the media is attached to when you click on it. But with a bit of tweaking, this view could be used to show just the media file (photo/video) with the option of going to the entry if desired or moving back and forwards through media. This simple change combined with filtering as mentioned above would add a whole new level of awesomeness to Diarium.
Show daily entries from oldest to newest
Calendar entries flow from top to bottom, left to right. Single entries go from oldest (left) to newest (right). However, when you click on a day in the calendar that has multiple entries, the newest one is shown at the top of the window. This doesn’t make any sense to me when going back over my journals, as I can click on a day from 5 years ago, and the first entry I see is the last one of the day. Going from the oldest entry (top) to the newest entry (bottom) would make much more sense.
Large photos in entries
When you have a large journal spanning many years, looking back over entries often plays as big a part as writing them. Diarium already looks really good, but I’d love to be able to assign a cover photo to each entry – one photo that sums up the entry, and see it large. For me it would take it from looking good to a thing of beauty. I mocked up an image a couple of years ago as a feature suggestion, and there was some consideration, but as of writing this feature has not been added.
Add captions for photos
Seeing as photos are ‘attached’ to entries rather than being placed inline, I would love the ability to add captions to photos. It would just give photos some added context, perhaps for naming people in photos, describing what photos were of, or to point out things in the photo which may not be apparent.
Refine on this day
‘On This Day’ is a great feature in Diarium. But I think it could really do with a customisable cut-off threshold. I say this because I actually copied a year’s worth of diary entries into Diarium from when I was 15. Of course I want to keep these, but do I really want to review what 15-year old me was doing on this day – not really. Having a setting to limit ‘On This Day’ to a custom number of years – I’d probably go five to ten, would keep reflecting much more focused. Also, the ability to exclude entries from on this day with certain tags/people could be useful for many.
WYSIWYG markdown support
I love markdown and find it so easy to use in UpNote and Typora. Having markdown support would mean formatting could easily be done via keyboard rather than right-clicking and applying rich-text formatting allowing me to format my entries more without losing flow by selecting text and right-clicking. It’s not a biggie, but would just be a nice quality-of-life improvement. However, this has been discussed on the forums and will likely not be implemented. At the very least, the addition of formatting with H2,H3,H4 headers would be much appreciated.
Non-timeline entries
Journals often have supplementary material such as goals lists, lists of places visited etc. Whilst there are plenty of note-taking apps out there, I do feel that Diarium could benefit from having somewhere that isn’t in the timeline to add and have easy access to notes that are evergreen. Personally, I would keep my goals list and my bucket list in there (currently in UpNote)
