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Eighteen years of photos, in one place you own
The photos of your child's first year are currently spread across three phones, a group chat and a cloud account somebody will eventually stop paying for. This is one place, owned by you, that is meant to still be there in 2044.
- Everyone in the village can add photos and stories, not just you
- Location data stripped from every upload, automatically
- Download the entire vault — photos and every word — whenever you like
The memories other people have
The best photograph of your baby this month is probably on somebody else's phone. Anyone in your village can add a memory — a photo, a short story, the date it happened — and it lands in the same feed as yours, with their name on it.
Grandparents add the ones from Sunday lunch. The auntie adds the video from the hospital corridor. In a year you have a record that no single phone could have produced.
What happens to a photo when you upload it
It is checked by content rather than by file extension, rotated the right way up using the camera's own orientation data, then re-encoded into three WebP sizes — full, display and thumbnail. That re-encode is also what strips the metadata: EXIF, camera model, and the GPS coordinates that would otherwise tell anyone with the file exactly where your house is.
The measured result on a real 2.2 MB phone photo is 273 KB across all three sizes — about an eighth of the original — which is why a family album can live on a small server for eighteen years without anyone paying for a storage tier every month.
- Validated by content, never by filename
- EXIF and GPS removed by the re-encode, not merely hidden
- Three sizes generated so a phone never downloads a 4000px image
- Roughly 88% smaller, measured, not estimated
A feed, not a folder
Memories appear newest-first with photos, the story, and who added it. Villagers can celebrate one with a tap or leave a comment; parents can hide any comment without deleting it, and unhide it later. The photo wall shows the whole vault as a grid when you just want the pictures.
It is your data, and you can take it
One button downloads the entire vault as a ZIP: every photo at full resolution, plus every milestone, journal entry, letter, gift, guest, prediction and RSVP as readable JSON, with a plain-English index explaining what each file holds. No support ticket, no waiting, no export queue.
If you ever close the account, that button still works. And if a subscription lapses, nothing is deleted — the site becomes read-only, your village can still visit and read everything, and the export stays open.
What it does not do
Photos only — video is stored as a link to YouTube or Vimeo rather than uploaded, because hosting video for eighteen years honestly costs more than this product charges.
Storage is capped by plan (500 MB, 2 GB or 5 GB, with add-ons). Those numbers sound small until you know a typical photo here is around 270 KB: 2 GB is roughly 7,000 photographs.
Questions
What happens in eighteen years if you are gone?
You export the vault, which you can do at any time, today. That is the honest answer, and it is why the export is one button rather than a support request.
Do you look at or train on our photos?
No. They are served only to people holding your private link, and they are never used for anything else.
Can I delete a photo?
Yes, and deleting a memory removes its photos from disk and reclaims the storage — it does not leave them lying around counting against your quota.
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