Memory Board
Photos and captions from everyone, one board.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your share link and your manage link appear here once the board is made.
Everyone’s photos of the same evening, in one place
Somebody leaves, or turns forty, or the team finally gets to the same city for two days. Four people take photos and all four end up in four different phones: one goes to the group chat and scrolls away by Tuesday, two are never seen again, and the good one cannot be found. A Memory Board is one link that collects them — a photo and a line about it from each person, on one page, for the person it is all about. You start it, you get two links, you send one round. Nobody has to sign up and nobody installs anything. What is different here, and worth knowing before you send the link, is that a photo does not appear the moment somebody adds it.
Why the organiser sees everything first
A shared page anybody can write on is one thing when what they can write is a sentence, and quite another when they can put a picture on it. So the person who started the board sees every photo before anybody else does, and nothing goes up until they say yes. No clever software makes that decision and none is coming: an automatic check costs money per photo on a site that is free, hands a copy of your photos to a company you did not choose, and still only gives a probability. The person running the leaving do knows who is in the room.
That promise is kept below the page rather than by it. While a photo is waiting, the full-size file is not something the site will hand to anyone — not to a stranger, not to the person who uploaded it, not even to someone who has somehow worked out exactly where it is stored. What the organiser reviews is a small preview: enough to see what a picture is of, and the only readable copy until they have decided.
How to run one
- Say what the board is for. “Sarah’s leaving do” is plenty.
- Keep the manage link safe. On this tool it is also the only way anybody ever approves a photo — lose it and the board collects photos nobody can ever put up.
- Send the share link round. Six characters, so it survives being read out across a room.
- People add a photo, a caption, and a short description of what is in the picture.
- Work through what is waiting on your own link. Yes puts it on the board; no takes it away for good.
- When you have what you want, close the board. Everything on it stays readable.
Three things worth knowing before you send the link
Your photo does not carry your location. Phones write the exact coordinates of where a photo was taken into the file itself, and almost nobody knows it is there. Your browser redraws and re-saves every photo before it leaves your device, which discards all of it, and we do the same again when it arrives. What is stored is the picture.
The board deletes itself. Ninety days after the last time anybody touches it, the board and every photo on it are removed — the actual files, by the same nightly job that removes the page. Every new photo pushes that date out again. Nothing can bring one back, so if the board is the only copy of a good photo, save it before then.
Write the description as well as the caption. The form asks for both, which is a small nuisance with a real point behind it. The caption is the joke or the memory — “the moment Dev realised there was cake”. The description is what is actually in the picture — “five people round a desk, one holding a cake” — and it is what somebody using a screen reader hears instead of the photo. A board of thirty photos with no descriptions is a board they cannot use at all.
Good uses
- A leaving present, where the card is words and this is the evidence.
- A big birthday, with photos spread across twenty phones and thirty years.
- A team trip, collected while everyone still remembers what happened.
- A wedding, for the pictures the photographer was never standing in the right place for.
When to use something else
This collects pictures. If what you want is everybody’s words for one person, saved up and opened at once, that is Group Card. For thank-yous on a wall the team reads as they land, that is Kudos Wall. For who is paying for the present, that is Gift Pledges. And if you want somewhere permanent for a few hundred photos, use a real photo service — this is a page for one occasion that tidies itself away afterwards, which is a different thing and is the point of it.
Questions people ask
- Who sees a photo before it goes on the board?
- Whoever started the board, and nobody else. When you add a photo it goes to them as a small preview, and it only appears on the board once they have said yes. Until then the only two people who can open it are you and them — that is not a rule the page follows, it is a rule the database follows: the full-size file is in a private store, and nothing will hand it out for a photo nobody has approved, even to someone who knows exactly where it is. We chose a person over an automatic check on purpose. A paid image-scanning service costs money per photo on a free site, sends every photo you upload to a third company, and gives a guess; the person who organised the leaving do knows everyone in the room and gives an answer.
- Does my photo carry my location?
- Not once it reaches us. Your phone writes the exact spot a photo was taken into the file, along with the time and the camera, and most people have no idea it is there — which means somebody adding a picture of their cat to a board the whole office can open would be publishing their home address. So before anything is sent, your browser redraws the photo at a smaller size and saves it fresh, and the saved copy has nowhere to keep any of that. We strip it again on our side, so it holds even for a file that did not come through this page. The photo you see on the board is the picture and nothing else.
- What happens to the photos afterwards?
- The board and every photo on it are deleted ninety days after the last thing anybody does to it — adding a photo, approving one, opening the manage link. Every one of those pushes the date out again. When it goes, the files go with it: the pictures are deleted out of the store by the same nightly job that removes the board, not merely unlinked from a page. There is no archive, we cannot get one back, and neither can you, so save anything you want to keep before then. The organiser can also delete the whole board at any point, which does the same thing immediately.
- How big can a board be, and how big can a photo be?
- Thirty photos a board. Each one is resized on your device to about 1600 pixels along its longest side, which is more than enough to fill a laptop screen and about a tenth of the file your phone started with — that is what keeps the board quick to open on someone's mobile data at a party. If a photo is still too big after that, you are told rather than left waiting. Anything that is not a photo is refused: we check what the file actually is rather than what it is called, and drawings saved as SVG are turned away, because those can carry instructions rather than just pixels.
- Can I take something down?
- Yes, and there are two ways. Anybody looking at the board can report a single photo, which takes it off the board immediately and stops the file being served within the hour — one click, no questions, and the organiser can put it back from their manage link. The organiser can remove any photo themselves without troubling anybody, which is the better move for a photo that is simply not one of the good ones. And whoever is in a photo can ask the person who runs the board; the manage link is the only authority over a board, and it is theirs — an account changes when a board expires, not who runs it.