Built for one family at a time, not for an audience.
Heirloom does a small number of things and tries to do them for decades. Here is each one, with what it actually does rather than what it is called.
Journeys
A journey is one story your family keeps together — a child’s first year, a summer house, the last decade of a grandparent’s cooking. It is not a folder and not a feed.
- Memories sit on a winding chronological map of small round photo stops, so a journey reads as a path rather than a grid.
- Everyone invited can add to it. Contributor avatars show who has been here, and a compact unread pill shows what you have not seen.
- Each memory is a milestone: photos, videos, a voice note, a title and a date. Add a caption now or years later.
- Comment on a single photograph, or react to it, without turning the journey into a chat.
- Move a milestone to a different journey if it turns out to belong to another story.
Families and invitations
A family is the private room everything else lives inside. You create one or join with a code, and you can belong to more than one.
- Invite by a code or a link you send however you like — there is no directory to be found in.
- Every journey inside a family still has its own guest list. Being in the family does not mean seeing everything.
- Rename anyone privately. Your “Mum” stays your “Mum” while everyone else sees the name she chose.
- Switch between families — your own and your partner’s, say — without signing out.
Capture that keeps up
The moment worth keeping rarely waits for a good connection or a spare minute.
- Shoot photo or video inside the app, or bring in what is already in your camera roll.
- Record a voice note when the way someone says it matters more than a picture of them saying it.
- Capture first and file later — send it straight to a journey, or park it and choose the destination afterwards.
- Everything queues on the device when you are offline and uploads itself the moment you are back.
The private vault
Some photographs are not for the family. The Vault is a second, separate space with a second, separate lock.
- Its passcode is independent of your account password and is never used to sign in.
- It relocks itself whenever you leave the app, so a handed-over phone does not hand over the Vault.
- Unlock with Face ID, Touch ID or a fingerprint instead of typing, if you prefer.
- A wrong Vault passcode is throttled on its own and never counts toward locking you out of your account.
- Nothing in the Vault is ever visible to a family, and nothing in it appears in a journey.
Memories as gifts
Choose a journey, a person and a date. On that morning, it opens for them.
- The journey keeps collecting right up to the reveal — it is a living gift, not a snapshot of the day you made it.
- Schedule for a birthday, a graduation, a wedding, or a date a long way out.
- See everything you have scheduled in one place, and change your mind before it opens.
The parts you stop noticing
Small things that decide whether an app gets used for ten years or ten days.
- Search across memories, people and journeys.
- Download what you have added, for your own backup.
- Notification controls per category, so the app tells you only what you asked to be told.
- A home screen that shows each journey as one bounded collage, adapting to however many photographs it actually has.
Start with one journey.
Pick the story you would be sorriest to lose, and put the first memory in it today.