PhotoDoc Archive
The family’s photographs, kept.
Your family’s photographs are on four phones, in three accounts, on your father’s old laptop and in a box in the closet. PhotoDoc is one archive for the whole family — everyone you invite can add to it and find things in it, every photograph gets a number, and what you write about it stays with the file.
Your phone’s cloud backs up your phone. It does not keep your family’s pictures, and PhotoDoc does not try to replace it. This is where the photographs go when they are kept.
What it is
One place, and everyone can reach it
- One archive per family. You own it and you choose who comes in: contributors, who add photographs and describe them, and viewers, who look and download. Someone in two families’ archives — their own and a parent’s — moves between them without signing in again.
- Folders in, as albums. Choose a folder on your computer and each folder inside it becomes an album, with the files beneath it in their original form.
- Albums and folders. A photograph can be in any number of albums, and albums sit in folders you arrange — Photos, Documents, and whatever you nest under them. Moving an album never moves a file, and anything in no album is gathered in one place so that nothing is lost by not being filed.
- Photographs, video and papers. iPhone photographs and Live Photos, camera RAW files, video and PDFs are all ordinary files here, kept as they are, with previews to browse them by.
- Titles, dates, places and people, in your family’s own words.
What it does differently
The things an archivist would insist on
- A number for every record. PD00042, issued once and never reused. A Live Photo’s two halves, a RAW file and its JPEG, or the pages of one scanned letter share one number. You can write it on the back of the print.
- Your notes stay with the file. What your family writes about a photograph is kept in a small file beside it, in every copy you take away — so the notes do not go missing on the way out, which is exactly where they usually go missing.
- Your own copy. As the owner you can keep a full copy on your own computer, every note beside every file, brought up to date from the site whenever you like. You can also make zips — of everything, of one album, or of what is new — and send the link to anyone in the archive.
- And the archivists are one step away. The people who built PhotoDoc describe family archives for a living. A way to send photographs from PhotoDoc into a described family archive is planned; it is not built yet.
How it is kept
What we actually do
We do not promise “forever”; no one honestly can. This is what is done:
- Every file is checked by its fingerprint when it arrives, so the same photograph cannot be uploaded twice by accident, and it is stored exactly as it came — never recompressed.
- A second copy is kept in another part of the country, locked against deletion for 90 days, so that a mistake — yours or ours — cannot remove it in that time.
- Files are re-checked against their fingerprints, in both copies, because a file that quietly corrupts is the failure nobody notices.
- A Trash keeps what anyone removes for 30 days before it is gone.
- Each archive has room to grow. If an archive fills up, nothing is deleted or hidden — uploads stop until there is room.
Said plainly
What it is not
- Private means invite-only. Only the people you invite can open your archive, and each family’s archive is kept apart from every other. It is not end-to-end encrypted, and Heinz Bros can technically see the files.
- It does not back up your phone. You choose what goes in.
- It does not recognise faces. People are named by your family, by hand.
- A name in PhotoDoc is your family’s word. Nothing in it is researched or checked by us; that is what a described archive is for.
Beginning
How to start one
While PhotoDoc is new, an archive is started with an invite code from us, or by asking — tell us who it is for and we will write back. Either way you begin by making an account.
Invited into someone else’s archive? You need do nothing here — your invitation email has everything.