The Journal app will very intelligently pick out suggestions for you that you might like to write about. Perhaps places you visited, people you met with, or music you’ve enjoyed. Now, while these are great, a lot of the time, it may well be that actually, you don’t want it to automatically choose things for you. Perhaps you want to turn off location or turn off contacts, maybe turn off exercise or something like that. Well, we can customize what suggestions are available to us. All we need to do is jump into the Settings app and then scroll down a bit until you reach Journal.

Now, on the Journal settings page, there’s an option there for journaling suggestions which we’re going to tap on now. Then, I want to go onto suggestion privacy settings. From here, you’ve got a checklist of different things that you can enable or disable depending on what you would like. So, perhaps I want to turn off frequently visited locations on my phone, so I’ll simply turn that toggle off. And then, I can choose other things if I want to. It’s also on this page where we can decide if you want your phone to be discoverable by other Journal users on their phone. So, maybe you’ve gone out for a drink with your best friend. If you’ve both got this setting turned on, that encounter will show up as your suggestions for both of you. I can turn this on or off as I wish, and it’s totally your choice.

When we’re done, we’ll jump out of Settings, and we’ll go back into the Journal app. Here on my suggested journaling posts, you can see now I’ve got no more locations that I visited. I do have workouts which do contain geolocation, so you can still see where I was during a workout. But there’s no more recently visited places like a supermarket or work or a village or anything else. So, that’s one way you can customise the Journal app to better suit you on iOS 17.2.