Keepsake
Collaborative storytelling platform for family memory books
A sophisticated platform that transforms family memories into professionally printed hardcover books through real-time collaboration, featuring built-in document and image editors with AI assistance.
The Challenge
Family memories are scattered. Photos buried in phone albums, stories trapped in ageing minds, attempts at collaboration lost in endless email chains. Most families want to preserve their history, but existing solutions fall short.
Rigid interview templates miss the organic flow of storytelling. Google Docs for writing, Photoshop for images, a separate printer for production. It's too many tools, too many handoffs. And when grandma's working alongside her tech-savvy grandson, the friction compounds.
We needed to build something different. A platform that feels as simple as any doc you've used, but handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Real-time collaboration across generations, image processing, AI assistance, and print production. All in one place.
The Solution
We built everything into one place. Write together in real-time, edit photos without leaving the page, and turn it all into a printed hardcover book.
The interface feels familiar, like the docs everyone already knows how to use. But underneath, there's real power. Colour-coded cursors show who's writing where. Comments thread like conversations. @mentions pull in the right people. Every keystroke syncs live across devices. No conflicts, no overwrites, just smooth collaboration.
The photo editor lives right in the platform. Crop, adjust, add filters. All the basics. The standout feature: AI upscaling that rescues old phone photos and faded scans, making them print-ready. It'll even warn you if an image won't look sharp on the page.
Prompts help families dig deeper than surface-level answers. AI can turn a question like 'What was your childhood home like?' into a proper chapter title: 'The Yellow House on Maple Street.' It's assistance, not automation. The stories stay human.
The output is a proper book. A5 hardcover, 150gsm paper, professional chapter layouts. Families choose from 14 cover designs and 8 chapter styles. Ships in a week.
How It Works
Three systems working as one. Collaborative editing lets families write together from anywhere. Image processing turns old photos into print-ready memories. Print production handles the design and delivers a physical book.
Collaboration Without the Headaches
Getting multiple people to write together usually ends in version chaos. Someone's edits overwrite someone else's. You're emailing documents back and forth. It's a mess.
Keepsake handles this properly. When someone types, everyone sees it happen live. Colour-coded cursors show exactly who's writing where. You can comment on specific sections, @mention your sister to get her input on a story about dad. There's a proper version history if you need to roll something back. Permissions let you decide who can edit versus who can just read and comment.
The result: a family in three different states working on the same book like they're sitting around the same table.
The Photo Problem, Solved
Old family photos are usually terrible quality. Phone shots from 2009. Scanned prints that are half the resolution they need to be. Photos of photos from when you visited grandma.
The platform has a full photo editor built in. Not just crop and rotate. Actual tools. Filters, brightness, contrast, text annotations. You can size images differently depending on how important they are to the story. Everything adjusts to fit the flow of the page.
The clever bit: AI upscaling. Feed it a low-res image and it'll intelligently enhance it for print. It's not magic. It can't fix everything. But it saves a lot of photos that would otherwise be unusable. And if something still won't print well, it'll warn you before you commit.
Writing That Doesn't Feel Like Homework
Interview prompts are usually boring. "Where were you born?" "What was school like?" They get generic answers.
Keepsake uses prompts designed to actually spark memories. Questions that make people think. There's a queue system so you can save interesting questions for when you have time to dig into them properly. The bookmark panel shows your progress—what you've written, what's left, how long each section is.
The AI assistance is subtle. It can take your working title and polish it up. "That time we moved to Brisbane" becomes "The Year Everything Changed: 1987." It's there if you want it, invisible if you don't. The goal is to make the writing easier, not to write it for you.
From Digital to Physical
Here's where it gets real: turning all this digital collaboration into an actual book you can hold.
The platform handles design automatically. Pick from 14 cover options. Choose a chapter divider style. The colour palette coordinates across the whole book—covers, chapter pages, everything. Professional chapter layouts with proper spreads. Optional table of contents. You can reorder chapters, hide sections that aren't ready yet.
When you hit print, it generates a PDF with proper colour calibration and quality checks built in. Page count can be anything from 32 to 536 pages. Each subscription includes one book; extras are $89 each. Ships in a week. Plus you get a PDF copy you can share digitally.
The Technical Side
Building this wasn't simple. Real-time sync across unlimited users. Conflict resolution so edits don't clash. Image processing pipelines. AI upscaling infrastructure. Print-ready PDF generation with variable page counts. Quality assurance automation. Cross-device synchronization that actually works.
The hard part was making all that complexity invisible. It needed to feel as simple as Google Docs, but do things Google Docs can't do. That's the achievement here—sophisticated infrastructure wrapped in something grandma can use without a tutorial.
