Year in Pixels on iPhone: See Your Whole Year at a Glance

A year in pixels is a grid of 365 small squares, one per day, that you fill in each day based on something you’re tracking. On iPhone, Daily — Life Calendar does this with a year-in-dots view and a contribution graph, and it can live right on your lock screen so the picture updates on its own.

What is a year in pixels, exactly?

The idea is to compress a whole year into one readable image. Each day gets a square. Traditionally people color the square by mood, but the same format works for anything you can mark once a day: whether you exercised, wrote, read, meditated, or kept a streak going. Look at the finished grid and you see patterns you’d never notice one day at a time. Good stretches, rough weeks, the slow build of a habit.

The appeal is that it’s a single screen. No scrolling through months, no adding up numbers. Just color and space telling you how the year is going.

How does Daily do a year in pixels on iPhone?

Daily gives you two views that capture this idea:

• Year-in-dots view. Every day of the year is a dot on your wallpaper. Days you complete fill in green. The view also shows a “days left” count and a percentage of the year gone, so you get the pixel grid and a sense of time in one glance.
• Contribution graph. This is the GitHub-style chart, a row of weeks where each square gets greener the more you keep up. It’s a clean way to see consistency stretch across the year.

Because both can sit on your lock screen as a wallpaper, you don’t have to open an app to update your grid. You mark a habit as done, and the day fills in. An iOS Shortcut refreshes the wallpaper daily, so the picture stays current without any effort.

Mood or habits: which should you track?

Classic year-in-pixels charts often track mood, assigning a color to how each day felt. Daily leans toward habits and completion instead: the same green fill that marks a finished day also builds a streak and feeds the contribution graph. That makes the grid double as motivation, because you can see a chain forming and you don’t want to break it.

You can still use it loosely as a mood or “good day” tracker by treating a completed day as a good day. The format is flexible; what matters is that you mark it and it shows up.

Why keep it on the lock screen?

A year-in-pixels chart only helps if you see it. Kept in an app, it’s out of sight for days at a time, and you forget to fill it in. On your lock screen, it’s in front of you every time you pick up your phone. That visibility is the whole point: the grid reminds you to act, and then records that you did.

Daily also offers home-screen widgets, including a Contribution Chart widget, if you’d rather keep the grid there. Many people run the wallpaper and a widget together.

Getting started

Setup is quick: add a habit or two, choose the year-in-dots view or contribution graph, generate the wallpaper, and set it. Then turn on the daily refresh so it maintains itself. For the exact wallpaper steps, see how to put a calendar on your iPhone lock screen.

Everything stays on your device and syncs through your own iCloud, with no account required. You can get Daily on the App Store and start filling in your year today.