Apple Journal app: How to start journaling on iPhone

A diary can be a great and invaluable record of your life, but who has time for that? Well, now you do: Apple’s iPhone Journal app makes keeping a diary a breeze. Really, it couldn’t be any easier.

Apple’s Journal app, newly updated in iOS 18, lets you build a record of your life into a multimedia digital diary. Your iPhone will pull together details from your photos, locations and events to give you prompts for memories worth writing about.

Here’s the nitty gritty on using the Journal app — and its latest features.

How to start journaling with Apple Journal app on iPhone

To get Apple’s Journal app, you must be running iOS 17.2 or later. New features, such as adding your mood to a journal entry, search, Home Screen widgets, writing stats and streaks are exclusive to iOS 18. The big update is available now in Settings > General > Software Update.

Note: Apple’s Journal app is still not available for iPad, Mac or Vision Pro.

Table of contents: How to start journaling with Apple Journal app on iPhone

1. How to start using Apple’s Journal app
2. Pick a prompt to start a Journal entry
3. Create a Journal entry
4. Edit or delete a Journal entry
5. See your statistics and streaks
6. Turn on notifications and Face ID
7. Filter your entries
8. Journal vs. mental health tracking

1. How to start using Apple’s Journal app

Open Apple’s Journal app on your iPhone to get started. You’ll see just one screen explaining how it works. In the app, you can write about anything and everything — what you got up to, the places you went, the photos you took, how you felt. Your journal can be locked by Face ID and/or your iPhone’s passcode, so only you have access. You also can optionally turn on notifications to remind you to write. The Journal app will also maintain your writing streak, good for establishing a habit.

After you hit the + for the first time to start your first Journal entry, you’ll see a pop-up recommending you turn on journaling suggestions. If you allow this, the app will suggest activities you’ve recently done, people you’ve connected with, highlights from Photo Memories and prompts for journaling ideas, like taking a photo of an object that makes you feel nostalgic.

This also gives Apple’s Journal app permission to look through your photo library, events and on-device location history to piece together what it thinks would make for great journal entries. As with many iPhone features, this happens in a privacy-first manner. Apple doesn’t need to see your data or personal life for this feature to work. Tap Allow to turn on suggestions.

I highly suggest you enable suggestions — they provide excellent prompts.

2. Pick a prompt to start a Journal entry

To get started with Apple’s Journal app tap the + button to create a new entry. Tap New Entry to start one, or scroll through the list of recommendations. Typically, the best recommendations come from your photo library — fun events you took pictures of, that you can add to by writing about the experience. Maybe you have a set of nice pictures of the beach, and in your Journal entry, you can write about the cool breeze and fun you had in the water. You may have pictures from a scenic view, and in your Journal entry you can write about the hike you took to get there. Tap on the Compose button underneath a set of pictures to write about that event.

Some suggestions offer you personal questions — your favorite piece of art, a childhood memory, something you did today. Tap on any of these to get started.

The Journal app pulls other suggested diary entries from your listening habits in the Music and Podcasts apps. These I don’t find very helpful. I don’t foresee myself years in the future fondly reflecting upon episode 622 of The CultCast, nor do I have anything new to say about Adele’s latest album after I’ve listened to it for the hundredth time. But your mileage may vary.

3. Create a new Journal entry

Give your entry a title, optionally, or just start writing the content. Entries in the Apple Journal app can be as long as you want. If you want to write more than a few paragraphs, you can use bold text to mimic subheadings.

Above the keyboard, you will see several options to add media to a note. They include, from left to right:

• Text Formatting lets you bold, italicize, underline, strikethrough or color text; add bulleted or numbered lists and quoted text.
• Smart Suggestions brings up the list of suggestions from before.
• Photos lets you pick from your photo library.
• Camera takes a picture without saving it to your photo library.
• Audio lets you record a brief voice memo.
• Locations lets you search for a point of interest using Apple Maps. You’ll build up a list of frequently used locations over time.
• State of Mind lets you log how you’re feeling in an entry. Select how positive or negative you feel on a sliding scale and pick what’s making you feel that way. It’ll also add a log to your mood tracking in Apple Health.

In the upper toolbar, you will see two more buttons. You can bookmark an important entry to find it easier later. Tap ⋯ for additional options. You can set the date — the time you’re writing the entry, the time of the event itself or a custom date. (Note: You can always edit this later.) You also can hide the title field if you don’t like to use it.

4. Edit or delete a Journal entry

If you decide you want to edit or delete an entry from the Journal app, Apple makes it easy. From the app’s main screen, tap the ⋯ in the bottom right of an entry, then tap Edit or Delete. You can also Print it, for some reason.

Editing an entry will bring up the full composition screen with all the features as before; you can add formatting, photos, a voice memo, location and more. You might want to go back and add pictures to an entry if you take or receive new ones later. Or you might want to edit the date or time if you got it wrong the first time.

Caution: Deleting a Journal entry is instant and permanent. There’s no “Recently Deleted” folder like there is in Photos and Notes.

5. See your statistics and streaks

In Apple’s Journal app, you can tap on the statistics at the top of the page to bring up detailed stats. Just like in Apple’s Weather app, you can tap on each of these widgets to expand them to show more information. The blue Entries block, for example, expands into a scrolling list where you can browse entries per year. The Visited block will show you the type of landmarks you write about most: movie theaters, restaurants, parks, etc. The Calendar shows you the distribution of entries over time.

6. Turn on notifications and Face ID

The second and third time you open the Apple Journal app, it will prompt you to turn on additional features.

Setting up a schedule is a good way to remember to log the things happening in your life. Tapping through Continue and Allow will bring you to Settings, where by default the Journal app will set up a schedule at 8 p.m. every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. If you don’t live a particularly exciting life, like yours truly, pare it down to once a week on Tuesday. If you get too many notifications, you’ll just train yourself to ignore them, and that defeats the purpose.

Locking your journal with Face ID (or Touch ID on older iPhones) will provide an extra layer of protection. Maybe there’s a mischievous someone who spies on your phone left unlocked on a table — they won’t be able to pilfer through your precious memories. I recommend turning on this setting if that concerns you.

You can always turn these on or off later by tapping the ⋯ button in the upper right from the main screen of the app. You can also find the options in Settings > Apps > Journal in the “General” section, down below.

7. Search and filter your entries

If you build up a lot of Journal entries, you have a few options for finding them in the timeline. Tap the Search button in the top right. Type in the search box to find text. Tap on the categories below to filter bookmarked entries, entries with photos, audio, music, reflections and more.

Apple Journal app vs. mental health tracking

I think it’s important to differentiate the new Apple Journal app from the iOS 17 feature in the Health app that lets you log your feelings. It’s easy to confuse the two — in a broad sense, they’re two features centered on your iPhone asking you about your day. The former is for building a personal diary; the latter is for tracking your feelings and seeing how they’re affected by things like sleep and exercise. The features have grown closer together in iOS 18, now that you can log your mood from inside a Journal entry.

After spending more time with the Journal app, I’m starting to really appreciate it. I continue to be impressed by how excellent the smart suggestions are. I love having a place to log funny stories and small daily moments so they’re not lost.

But the fact that Apple made the Journal app available only on the iPhone remains infuriating. Typing paragraphs of text on a phone feels like a chore. I would add many more entries if there were a Mac app, or even a Vision Pro app. Maybe next year.

More top features in iOS 18:

And check out the full list for even more.

We originally published this post on how to use the Apple Journal app on December 12, 2023. We updated it with new information.