6 October 2026 · 2 min read

How to make a timelapse of your baby’s first year

A year of daily photos becomes a minute of your baby growing up. What to shoot, how often, and how to keep every frame lined up.

A timelapse of your baby’s first year is one of those things that sounds like a lot of work and turns out to be mostly patience. You take one photo a day; a year later you press play and watch a newborn turn into a toddler in under a minute.

How long will it be?

It depends on how fast the frames play. Each daily photo becomes one frame:

One a day gives the smoothest result. One a week is a good fallback if daily feels like too much.

Setting up the shot

Consistency is everything. Small changes from day to day turn into flicker when the frames play quickly.

• Same place. A cot, a changing mat, a favourite chair. A plain, uncluttered background helps.
• Same time of day. Light changes a lot between morning and evening. Pick one and stick to it.
• Same distance and angle. Shooting straight down from above is the easiest to repeat.
• Same framing. Keep your baby’s face in roughly the same spot in the frame.

Keeping every frame lined up

Alignment is what makes a timelapse look smooth instead of jumpy. The simplest method is to see yesterday’s photo, faintly, over today’s camera view, and line your baby up with it. Journee’s timelapse camera does exactly this: it shows the previous day’s photo as a ghost to match.

Your baby will grow and move, of course, and that’s the point. Aim to keep their eyes roughly level and centred, and let everything else change.

Starting before birth

Some parents start with the bump. A few weeks of bump photos before the first newborn frame make a lovely opening. If you want to try it, use the same spot and lighting you plan to use once the baby arrives.

What if you miss days?

You will, and it’s fine. A handful of missing days in a year-long timelapse are invisible at playback speed. Just carry on the next day. If you have a photo from that day on your phone, you can usually add it later.

Putting it together

You can assemble the frames in a video editor, setting each photo to the same short duration. Or let an app do it: in Journee, the timelapse builds itself from your daily photos, ready to play whenever you like, and you can swap which photo of the day is used.

The real reward

The finished video is wonderful, but the habit is its own reward. You’ll have a photo of every single day of your baby’s first year, a record no one else has, and one you’ll be glad of long after the sleepless nights are forgotten.