Move your 1 Second Everyday library to a Mac

1 Second Everyday is a phone app: there is no 1SE desktop version, and no way to edit your video diary on a big screen. ClipDiary is a free, native Mac app built on the same one-second-a-day idea, and it can adopt a library you have already spent years filling. Here are the two ways in, and which one to pick.

Which import should you use?

It depends on what you can get out of 1SE. If you back up to 1SE Cloud you can request an official data export, which is the better route by a wide margin: every clip keeps its real date and caption, because they are read from the export rather than guessed. If all you have is a finished mashup — the movie 1SE stitched for you — ClipDiary can pull that apart instead.

Option 1: from your 1SE data export

1SE's privacy tooling will hand you a zip of everything on your account, snippets included. Asking for it happens on their website, not in the app:

1. Sign in to your 1SE account at me.1se.co/account.
2. Open the Account tab and scroll to Request your personal data.
3. Press Request Download. 1SE confirms the request and emails you a link when the zip is ready — expect to wait, this is not instant.
4. Unzip it. Inside you should see a files folder holding snapshots (the manifests listing every project and the date of every snippet) and snippets (the actual videos).
5. In ClipDiary, create or open a project, then choose Import ▸ Import 1SE Data Export… from the toolbar and point it at the unzipped folder.
6. ClipDiary lists the 1SE projects it found, biggest first. Pick the one to import and let it run.

What lands in your project: each snippet at its full recorded length — not the one second 1SE played — on its correct day, in the same order you had within a day, with its caption attached and the date stamp switched on. The files are copied byte-for-byte, so nothing is re-compressed. From there you can retrim anything that is now too long, or leave it and let the whole clip play.

Option 2: from a finished 1SE mashup video

A mashup is one long video with a date stamp burned into the bottom-left corner of every frame. That stamp is the only record of which day is which, so ClipDiary reads it: it scans the movie, watches for the stamp to change, and cuts a separate clip for each day.

1. Export or share your 1SE movie out of the app and get the file onto your Mac.
2. In ClipDiary choose Import ▸ Import 1SE Video… and select it.
3. Let it scan. It samples the video for date changes, then narrows each boundary down to about a single frame, so days are cut where they actually change.
4. Check the review list. You get one frame per detected day with its date, and anything questionable is called out for you to fix inline.
5. Import. Each day becomes its own clip on its own calendar day.

A busy background can make a stamp misread — a wrong day, sometimes a wrong year. A mashup always plays its days in order, though, so ClipDiary uses that: it trusts the longest run of dates that never goes backwards, then snaps the stragglers onto the day they belong between. Most misreads are corrected before you ever see them, and the review step exists for the rest. Because the frames already carry 1SE's own stamp, these clips come in with ClipDiary's date stamp off.

What changes once it is on your Mac

• Clips can be any length. No ten-second ceiling, and one day can hold several clips.
• You trim both ends. Drag in- and out-points along a filmstrip instead of picking a start time and accepting a fixed duration.
• Music is a timeline. Lay tracks across your days, trim which part of a song plays, set volume, fade in and out. A song keeps playing over silent photos.
• Title cards. Design a cover, an ending, or a card that sits in the middle of a month, and reuse it — edit the card and every video that uses it picks up the change on the next render.
• Render any range. A month, a year, everything, or a custom span, saved as an MP4 you own.
• Nothing leaves your Mac. No account, no cloud, no telemetry. Your clips live in a plain project folder you chose, and your edits are metadata — the media files are never modified.

What ClipDiary does not do

Worth knowing before you switch, because it is not a like-for-like replacement:

• There is no phone app and no sync. You shoot with your camera app as usual, then point ClipDiary at the folder your videos land in.
• There are no reminders nudging you to film today.
• It needs macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later.
• It is a personal tool that grew into something worth sharing, not a company's product. It is free, open source, and fixed when something is broken.