Frequently asked questions

Place the album flat on a table and light it evenly from both sides at roughly a 45-degree angle, so there's no glare on glossy photos and no shadow falling across the page. Mount your phone directly above the page — a selfie stick with a Bluetooth shutter or a simple stand works well — and keep the same distance for every shot. Photograph the whole spread, not individual photos.

Either works. Photographing a full two-page spread in one shot is faster; photographing one page at a time can give slightly higher resolution per photo if your album has many small prints packed closely together.

In the order they appear in the album, front to back. This matters: a page with a date or a title written on it (for example a section like "Summer 1963") is assumed to explain the pages that come right after it, until a new date appears. Photographing out of order can attach the wrong date to a batch of undated photos.

As many as your album actually has — the AI looks for every individual mounted photo. Results are most reliable when photos have a little visible space or a border between them; photos mounted perfectly edge-to-edge with no gap are the hardest case and occasionally get grouped together instead of separated.

Yes, though a mounted album page with visible space around each photo currently gives the most reliable individual crops. A loose stack or a single already-cropped photo is detected as one photo per upload.

They're kept untouched and are always available from the album — separate from the individual cropped photos, which are copies made from them, never the only copy.

Handwritten or printed dates and captions near the photos are read automatically. If a page has no date of its own, it inherits the most recently seen date from an earlier page — so photographing pages in order matters for this to work correctly.

Yes. When a photo is cropped, the date is written into the image file itself (its EXIF metadata), not just shown on screen. That means if you later download the photo or import it into Google Photos, it sorts into the correct year automatically.

Yes — every caption and date can be edited after processing. You can also rotate a photo left or right if the automatic orientation isn't quite right. Editing a date re-stamps the file itself, the same as the original automatic date.

No. Use the page-level rotate button and the whole page — the original scan and every photo already cropped from it — turns together in one step, keeping each photo's own individual rotation intact. There's no need to fix photos one at a time after a page was photographed sideways.

Yes. Anyone with access to the album can attach a short recorded audio story to any photo — useful for having a grandparent explain who's in a picture or what was happening, in their own voice, alongside the photo itself.

Only people you share the link with. On paid plans, you can add an extra layer: anyone opening the link for the first time has to enter a one-time code sent to their email, so the link can't be casually forwarded and opened by strangers.

Yes. They register a first name, last name, and email once and can then comment on any photo in the album. As the album owner, you decide whether family members are also allowed to edit captions and dates, or only comment.

On the Premium plan, yes — you can invite family members to photograph and upload their own album pages into the same shared family album.

This is one account-wide setting that applies to every album you share. With "specific people," only the email addresses you've explicitly added can get in. With "anyone with the link," whoever has the link can register with their own email and verify it — useful for a big family where you don't want to type in twenty email addresses one at a time. You can switch back to "specific people" later at any point without removing anyone who already joined.

The first time an invite link is opened, it logs that person straight in and offers to set a password — no waiting on a code. If the same link is opened a second time by anyone, it stops granting instant access and falls back to the normal email-verification flow instead. That means a forwarded or leaked link can't be used to quietly keep letting people in — only the first person who opens it gets the instant path.

Yes — anyone with access can mark photos as favorites, and there's a dedicated favorites view per album. As the owner, your own favorites are also included automatically when you download the full album archive.

No. The family hub's cover photo and short intro text are visible to anyone with the link, since they don't reveal any actual album photos — that's intentional, so people know they've got the right link before signing in. The real albums, and every photo in them, are only shown after logging in.

Yes on both counts. Nothing is public or indexed by search engines unless you deliberately make an album public and share its link, and only the people you've given access to can see it. You can delete an individual album or your whole account at any time, which removes the associated photos and data from our storage. Full details are in our Privacy Policy.

Ask them to check spam/junk first — verification and invite emails sometimes land there on the first message from a new sender. From the family hub panel, you can resend an invite to the same email at any time, which sends a fresh link.

Yes — create as many albums as you like and upload up to 20 pages total, at no cost. Every album gets a full working web album, hosted for 30 days.

Pro is a one-time payment of $29 for 200 pages (roughly 8-10 albums, at 20-25 pages each), shared across every album on your account — buy more 200-page packs any time for $29 each, and everyone with access to the account benefits immediately. Premium is an annual subscription for 500 pages (roughly 20-25 albums) and keeping a family archive alive long-term, with more storage, cheaper page packs ($19 instead of $29), and the ability to invite family to contribute their own albums.

Page capacity is shared across your whole account, not per album, so it's the total across everything you've digitized that counts. About seven small albums of 30 pages each add up to 200+ pages — exactly what Pro includes.

Free albums are hosted for 30 days. Download everything before then if you want to keep the photos, or upgrade to Pro or Premium to extend hosting.

Yes, on Pro and Premium — download everything as a single archive, including every original page, every cropped photo, and every recorded audio story as a single download.