RoadmapBeyond photos — the full family archive
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.
Shipped todayPhotos, in a private family archive
Restoration, colorize, denoise, deblur, deglare, face enhance, background removal, and animation are available for photos, with Photo Insight helping you choose what the image actually needs. Archive, Albums, Family Vaults, Archive Notes, batch processing, duplicate cleanup, caption and story help, search, cross-device sync, and GEDCOM import are available today. iPhone is on the App Store; Android is available through testing while broader access rolls out.
Live
Exploring nextDocuments — the back of the photo, then standalone letters
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
Exploring carefullyAudio — cassettes, voice notes, oral histories
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
Longer-termFilm — 8mm, Super 8, 16mm home movies
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
Longer-termVideo — VHS, Hi8, MiniDV
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
Why this order
We add new materials when families can capture them well
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 original-preserved care photos use today.
Start the archive with what you have today
The photo archive is live. Restore one photo free, name the people in it, and we’ll build the rest of the archive around you.