The promise is six generations, and it is not a promise about us.

Every company that has ever held a family's photographs has said it would keep them safe, and a good number of them are gone. So the undertaking here is deliberately a different shape. We do not promise that this company survives six generations. We promise that your family's archive and your printed books do not need it to.

What leaves with you

At any moment, free, you can download everything: the photographs at the resolution they were uploaded, the stories as plain text, the family tree in a format other genealogy software reads, and the finished books as PDFs. Not a queue, not a support ticket, not a premium feature. An export that is hard to get is not an export.

This stays true whether or not you ever support us, and after you stop. Support pays the bills; it does not buy access, and ending it takes nothing away, now or ever. A product that holds six generations of family memory and removes it over a failed card is not a product anybody should trust with six generations of family memory.

The printed book is the real backup

A bound book on a shelf needs no account, no format migration and no company. That is why the book is the product and the software is the machinery. Every printed volume is made once, from the material as it stood that day, and reprinting an edition prints the same file again rather than rebuilding it — so a second copy ordered in ten years is the same book, not a new one wearing the same number.

What we hold, and for how long

Originals are kept as uploaded. There is exactly one exception and it is narrow: long after everyone a chapter is about has died, and only once every family that chapter belongs to is already holding its own full-resolution copy, a photograph may be reduced to an archival master. If any one of those families is not holding originals, nothing is reduced — which means the safe outcome is also the default one.

Consent does not lapse

A person who refused to have a story printed about them stays refused after they die. A refusal is never reversed by a death, and a death cannot be used to open what somebody sealed. Those are not settings. They are the parts of the system with no switch on them.

If you find a place where the product does not do what this page says, that is a bug of the most serious kind we have, and we would like to hear about it.