Heartsake

Your family’s photos, and the stories behind them, in a book you own.

Heartsake brings your photos and the people who remember them together, in one book the whole family can read and add to. It lives on a drive you keep.

Three women, two boys and a small dog gathered around a delivery bicycle in front of a stone wall.

Patch went everywhere on the front of that bike.
Auntie Jean

Our Will’s wearing his dad’s tie. He’d been told not to.
Nan, told aloud

Can’t remember this day at all, but the cap’s still in my drawer.
Davey

Nan, Auntie Jean, Mum, our Will and little Davey, outside the Co-op, the summer of thirty-six.

An example family, made up to show how it works.

An old woman reads a book to a child, the two of them sitting at the foot of a great tree beside a rail fence.

She couldn’t see the page without her glasses, so she made the stories up.
Annie, told aloud

Whereabouts was the farm? We’d love to find it.
Ruth asks Annie

Great Gran reading to Annie, at the farm, when Annie was four.

Everybody knows a different part.

Your mum knows the year. Your uncle knows the dog’s name. Nan knows who’s missing from the picture.

Heartsake keeps what each of them says beside the photo, with their name on it. They can type it, or just say it out loud, and hear it again years from now.

Not sure who someone is? Ask. The question waits in the book for the one person who can answer it.

A book to read, not a folder to search.

Thousands of photos become chapters: a summer, a wedding, the year the house was built. Open any year and see what happened in it.

Open a person and read their whole life, from the first photo to the last, and everyone they shared it with.

Some of the best chapters have no photos at all. The years before anyone owned a camera are told in words, and they sit in the book like any other.

Yours to keep.

Your photos live on a drive your family owns, not in someone else’s cloud. Nothing leaves it unless you set that up yourself.

They stay exactly as they were taken. The words sit beside them as ordinary files, so in fifty years someone can still open them, with or without Heartsake.

A second drive keeps a copy, ideally in another house. Whoever opens the book can use it on the computer the drive is plugged into, or on a tablet at home.

Give it away, too.

A book of their own. A working copy for a grandchild, who can keep adding to it. What they add can come home to yours.
A website on a drive. It opens from the drive on any computer, with nothing to install, for good.
A printed book. Pages to hold, on A4 or US Letter.

You choose what goes in. Anything private stays behind, and the map position of photos taken at home is left out.

A studio portrait of a large family: a grandmother seated among children in white, with young men standing behind.

For Sam, on turning eighteen. All of us, and all of it.

Not quite ready yet.

We’re still building Heartsake, and we haven’t set a date. You’ll need a computer and a USB drive, and whoever knows the stories.

Leave your email and we’ll tell you when it’s ready to try. We won’t use it for anything else.