Birthdays & Milestones

The Birthdays widget shows upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and milestones, with how many days away each one is and how old the person is turning.

You don't type birthdays into Prism. It reads them from the calendars and contacts you already keep, so they stay correct in one place rather than two.

Where they come from

Source	What Prism reads
Any connected calendar	All-day events with birthday or anniversary in the title
iCloud / CardDAV contacts	The birthday field on your contact cards
Google Contacts	Google's own generated birthday calendar

Calendars of every kind are scanned — Google, iCloud/CalDAV, iCal subscriptions, and calendars created inside Prism itself.

iPhone birthdays

iCloud contacts are CardDAV, so the birthdays saved against contacts on your phone come straight through. Tick contact birthdays when connecting iCloud under Settings → Integrations.

Adding one Prism can't find

Give it a source: put the birthday on a calendar, and Prism picks it up on the next sync. Your own local Prism calendar is fine for this — you don't need an external account.

1. Create an all-day event on the birthday. A timed event is read as something happening near a birthday rather than the birthday itself.
2. Title it with the person's name and the word birthday: Grandma's Birthday
3. Optionally add the year in brackets to show their age: Grandma's Birthday (1948)

Without a year you still get the date and the countdown, just no age.

Anniversaries and milestones

Anniversaries work the same way — put anniversary in the title.

Milestones have no obvious keyword, so Prism looks for the shape instead: an all-day event that repeats every year and carries a year in the title.

Ana and Ben (2005)     ✅ milestone
Moved into the house     ❌ no year, so it's just an event

If you keep a calendar where everything on it is a life event, open Manage calendars and turn on "Treat every all-day event here as a birthday or milestone". Titles on that calendar then need no keyword at all.

Other languages

Titles are matched in English and German — Geburtstag, Hochzeitstag and Jubiläum all work. Adding another language is a one-line change in src/lib/services/birthday-detect.ts; contributions welcome.

Removing one

Deleting a birthday in Prism keeps it deleted. It won't come back on the next sync even though the calendar event still exists, so you can prune the list without editing the underlying calendar. Delete the calendar event too if you want it gone everywhere.

What Prism deliberately ignores

• Read-only calendars you subscribe to — school terms, public holidays and the like. This is what stops "No School — Martin Luther King's Birthday" becoming a family birthday.
• Events happening near a birthday — "birthday party", "prep for Sam's birthday", "birthday dinner". These describe the celebration, not the day.

If a birthday you expect is missing, check the event is all-day and that its calendar isn't a read-only subscription.