How can we help?

Record a conversation with the person — on your phone or any camera. Upload it, and we transcribe it, index it and add it to your family’s private archive, searchable by what was actually said.

Start with one conversation. Ask about one thing — the year they left, the house they grew up in, the reason they never went back — and record it. The window is open now; it won’t always be.

Record at 720p, 30 frames per second. That is plenty of quality for the archive and keeps the file size sensible so the upload actually finishes.

Hold the phone or camera horizontally (landscape) — sideways, not upright. It frames the person properly and looks right on every screen later.

Sound matters more than picture. Use a lavalier (clip-on) mic on the person if you can, and test it before you start — record a few seconds, play it back, and check you can hear them clearly.

Put the light on the person’s face, not behind them. Never sit them in front of a window — the camera turns a bright background into a dark silhouette. A window or lamp to the side, or behind you, works well.

Yes. Before or after the conversation, record about 15 seconds of the room with no one talking. It feels odd, but that "room tone" lets us clean the background hum out of the whole recording.

Don’t — let it run. One continuous take. The pauses, the "let me think", the tangents are the real thing. Start it, have the conversation, stop at the end. We handle the rest.

An archive admin can add anyone from the People tab — "Add family member" — even someone with no recordings yet, so they still appear on the family tree.

Yes. Open the person and choose "Edit details & relationships" — an admin can correct their dates, name, or who they’re connected to, and the change shows on the tree.

An archive admin can remove any item — open it and use Delete. Removed content is taken out of the archive and out of search.

An admin uses "Invite to view" to send a private link. People you invite can see the archive; they can’t change anything unless you make them a contributor.

Yes — use the Ask bar at the top. Ask a plain question ("Where did Dad grow up?") and it answers from the actual conversations, pointing you to where it was said.

Your phone or any camera. Upload from the web when you’re ready — video, photos and documents all go into the same archive.

No one outside your family. Archives are private by default. You invite the specific people you want, and you decide what each of them can see.

Yes. A recording is personal to the person in it, so we ask for their consent to record, store and transcribe — before anything is shared.

No. We process the recording, keep the published version and the transcript, and delete the raw upload. Your originals stay with you.

Yes. From your Account page you can export everything your archive holds. You can also delete your personal account — note the shared family archive is kept for the rest of your family; to remove specific content, delete those items first or contact us.

While you’re still recording and adding to the archive you’re in the building stage (a monthly Legacy Lite or Legacy plan). When you’re done capturing, you switch to Archive — read-only, priced on how much you’ve stored — so the record is kept without paying to keep building.

On your Account page, choose "I’m done — switch to archive." Your archive becomes read-only and the price moves to a lower archive rate based on your stored volume. Talk to us any time if you want to start building again.

On your Account page, open "Manage billing" and switch to Legacy. Legacy includes more storage, more family members and more Family Portrait slots than Legacy Lite, and the change takes effect right away.

Your archive isn’t deleted the moment a plan ends. When you’re done recording you can move to the lower-cost, read-only Archive plan to keep everything, and if a payment lapses there’s a grace period before anything changes. We’ll always contact you first — get in touch and we’ll make sure your family’s record is kept.

The archive belongs to your family, not to one account. If the person who set it up passes away, it stays intact for everyone else you’ve invited, and we can help transfer who manages it — just contact us.

Your recordings and photos are held with vetted providers (Cloudflare and Backblaze) and served only over encrypted, session-bound links — never a public URL. Payments run through Stripe; we never store your card. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Only the providers that actually run the service: Cloudflare (storage and delivery), Backblaze (backup), Neon (database), Render (hosting), Stripe (payments), Resend (email) and Anthropic (transcription and AI features). They’re listed in our Privacy Policy. We do not sell your data or share it for advertising.

Yes. Consent is per person, so an admin can remove one recording, or everything tied to a person, at any time — it comes out of the archive and out of search.

Deleting your account removes your personal login and details. The shared family archive itself is kept for the rest of your family, since it’s a shared record. To remove specific recordings or photos, delete those items first, or contact us.

Export everything your archive holds from your Account page, delete your personal account there, or email us for anything else — access, correction or removal. We respond within 30 days.

No. Your recordings never go into public AI tools and are never used to train AI models. Ingesting your archive and making it searchable runs on our own private model, and the whole archive stays private to your family. AI is used only to transcribe, organise and search your family’s own record — nothing else, and never shared.

We build to standard accessibility practices — keyboard navigation, readable colour contrast and text alternatives — and test contrast and mobile layouts as part of each release. If anything is hard to use with your setup, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Every recording gets a full written transcript you can read alongside it — helpful if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, or simply prefer to read. Search works off that transcript too.

Yes. We transcribe in multiple languages and detect the language automatically, so conversations in Welsh, Chinese, Tamil, English and more are transcribed and searchable.

MP4 or MOV, including iPhone HEVC video, up to 5 GB per file. For a long recording, split it into ~20-minute parts and upload each part.

Large files struggle on home connections. Use a strong or wired connection, keep the tab open until it finishes, and split long recordings into ~20-minute parts. If it still won’t go through, use the "upload trouble" link so we can help.

Usually a few minutes after the upload finishes — we transcribe it, index it and make a thumbnail. Longer videos take longer; it appears in the archive when it’s ready.

Use "Forgot password" on the login page and we’ll email you a reset link.

Use the Contact page, or the "get in touch" link in the Help Centre, and we’ll come back to you.

Yes. Invite family as contributors and they can add their own recordings and photos; admins manage people and relationships.