Photos are the live starting point. Many families also have letters, audio tapes, home movies, and old video, and those materials belong beside the photos they explain. This page shows what is available now and what we are exploring next. Read Our Mission for the full why.
Scan a print or bring a digital photograph, follow a careful repair, and keep the Source beside every result. Add people, dates, places, notes, and stories; organize the collection in Albums and a private Family Vault; then invite relatives to fill in what they remember. Mobile is best for scanning and restoring on the go, while web gives larger collections more room for review, search, family-tree import, and batch work.
Live
Handwritten captions on the back of a photo are already part of Archive Notes. Standalone documents are a natural next step: letters, ledgers, certificates, diaries, and newspaper clippings that should sit beside the photos they explain.
Exploring
Many family archives include voices: cassettes, voice notes, oral histories, and recorded memories. Audio belongs in the family story, but it should only ship when cleanup and transcription make a recording clearer without changing its meaning.
Exploring
Home movies often need digitization before software can help. Once a family has a usable video file, the archive can eventually help organize, clean up, and share the moments inside it.
Longer-term
VHS, Hi8, and MiniDV are common in inherited collections, but they require extra capture hardware and careful handling. The goal is the same as photos: preserve the source, make the result easier to review, and keep family context attached.
Longer-term
The hard part usually starts before repair: getting the artifact off the shelf and into a usable file. Photos are easy: a phone scan or camera capture. Documents take a flatbed scan, which many family archivists already have. Audio cassettes, film, and VHS need extra hardware that most families do not own. We expand in the order people can realistically capture, so the archive grows with the materials already within reach.
We also avoid promises that outrun quality. When we support a new medium publicly, you should be able to review the result, keep the source file, add family context, and share it privately with the same accepted-Source preservation photos use today.
The photo archive is live. Start with the app for capture and restore, name the people in one meaningful photo, then open web when the collection needs more room.