Capturing memories
Adding photos, including the old ones
Do not bulk-import thirty thousand images. The value is not in the volume, and an archive that starts as a dump is one nobody opens.
Step by step
Choose selectively
Add photographs that carry something — a person, a place, a turning point. Not every image from a holiday.
Say one sentence about each
A photo with twenty seconds of spoken context is worth a hundred without. This is the whole method.
Prioritise the unidentifiable
Old prints whose subjects only one living person can name are the most urgent items in any family's collection.
Photograph prints rather than waiting to scan
A phone photo of a print, taken today with a relative narrating, beats a perfect scan that never happens.
Which photographs are worth adding
The useful filter is not quality and it is not recency. It is whether the image would need explaining. A blurry photograph of four people in a kitchen in 1978 is worth more to this archive than a technically perfect landscape, because the blurry one has context that is about to expire.
A rough working order: photographs with people nobody young can identify; photographs of places that no longer exist or are about to be sold; photographs attached to a tradition that is still running; and then everything else.
The shoebox
Almost every family has a box of prints, slides, or an album with the adhesive turning brown. The instinct is to scan the whole thing properly before doing anything else. This is the plan that never finishes, and while it is not finishing the people who can annotate the contents are getting older.
Invert it. Take a handful of prints to whoever is oldest, photograph each one with a phone, and record them talking about it. Twenty annotated photographs beats two thousand unannotated scans by an enormous margin, and you can always scan properly later — the identifications are the perishable half.
People grouping is off unless you turn it on
KeepSaiQ can group photographs by person, and it does not do so unless you enable it. When you do, a face signature — a numeric representation, not a picture — is created for faces in your family's photos, stored inside our cloud account, kept separately for each family, and used only to group that family's own photos.
Turning people grouping off deletes your family's signatures, and they are also deleted when the family is deleted. The full retention and destruction schedule is published on the Biometric Data Policy page rather than merely summarised.
Common questions
- Should I upload my whole photo library?
- No. A bulk dump recreates exactly the problem you are trying to escape — thousands of images with no context. Add selectively and attach a sentence to each; the archive is built out of annotated items, not volume.
- Do I need a proper scanner for old prints?
- No. A phone photograph taken in good light is entirely adequate, and it has the decisive advantage of being something you will actually do this weekend. The identification is the part with a deadline, not the resolution.
- Does KeepSaiQ recognise faces automatically?
- Only if you turn people grouping on; it is off by default. When it is on, face signatures are kept separately for each family and used only to group that family's own photos, and turning the feature off deletes them.
Related
Photos that keep their meaning
A private home for family photos that keeps the story attached — who was there, what it meant, and why it mattered — instead of another folder nobody opens.
For the family's designated keeper
Every family has one archivist holding the photographs, the names and the stories. A shared archive turns that single point of failure into something everyone holds.
Who can see what
A plain answer to the question every family asks first: who can see your memories, what our systems do with them, and what we do not do.
Start your family's living memory
Free to start. Your first memory takes twenty seconds, and it stays private to your family.
Create your free account
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