Lifetimes, Families, Memories, Photos: How to Tell the Story of Your Life with Mylio Photos

written by David Vaskevitch, CEO and Founder of Mylio Photos

This article is sponsored by Mylio Photos.

Our lives are fleeting, but our memories have the potential to live beyond us.  A family tree brings to life the texture of the key people in our lives.  Pictures, though, bring the memories of people and families to life. Mylio Photos is the first platform built to capture the memories of the lifetimes of your family and friends. What a family tree starts, Mylio Photos completes.

Mylio Photos is an app that runs on your phones – yours, your partner’s, your children’s – your tablets, and your computers. With Mylio Photos, you’ll bring all your photos, videos, and important documents into one beautiful library. You’ll never lose anything and access what matters most, even if your external drive with photos is thousands of miles away.

Your pictures, documents, and memories are on your devices, private, and all yours.  You can also store those memories in the cloud, but that is your choice, not ours.

What are memories? They are ephemeral and live in our heads, but they also take physical form in photos, videos, and documents.  The mission of Mylio Photos is to change how the world remembers by organizing, protecting, and giving you constant access to those physical memories to augment and trigger the real memories in our hearts and our heads. But what does this mean, and how does it look? 

My Life Calendar – The Calendar of My Life

At the center of Mylio Photos is a Life Calendar.

The first calendar (pictured below) shows events and pictures from 14 years. That’s just the beginning. 

Next, below we see years from the ’50s and finally from the ’30s. This is a calendar not just of my life but of the lives of my parents, my children, and more – stretching back several generations. 

Finally, we see a zoomed-out calendar view showing five decades on one screen.

That calendar is not just about the passage of the years but about the many events that took place during those years.  So, there are no dentist appointments or flight departure times in the Life Calendar, but year by year, month by month, and even day by day, the events define all those lives.  

Before leaving the calendar, we’ll zoom in on one year and see my birth there.  When we tap on that event – on the phone, tablet, or computer – there’s a picture of my parents and me. So, as you see this, think: where are the pictures of your birth, your children’s births, and the moments of births of people you care about?  

With Mylio Photos Photos, the answer is “with you always, everywhere.”

But Is It really a Calendar?

Until now, we’ve been looking at a picture of an entire lifetime – more than one.  The next picture shows Mylio Photos zoomed in to a particular year, where we can see the most important events month by month. 

Next to it, we dive into a particular month, and now we can see what is happening a day and a week at a time. 

So, yes, Mylio Photos is a calendar; even more, it amplifies your memory.

Where Has My Family Been?

A calendar captures time. This calendar captures events too – weddings, trips, performances, and special occasions.  But what about space? So, here is a map of everywhere I’ve lived and been.

I grew up in Toronto and have visited this city many times since. The next map shows all the places I’ve visited in Toronto. 

That’s zooming in. But sometimes I want to know where I’ve been with somebody else. So, here’s a map of where I’ve been with my daughter.

By the way, it took Mylio Photos less than one second to come up with that map; you can’t even time it.

What About the People In Our Lives?

Pictures have a lot of people in them. Family Trees are all about people, but when we see those people in pictures, they come to life, or at least the memories come to life for us as people.  

A picture may have just one person (or even none) in it, but it could have many people if it is about a family event. So, for example, I have 6,210 pictures of my mother in my Mylio Photos. How do I know that?  Mylio Photos recognizes faces – automatically.  So, Mylio Photos found those 6,210 pictures of my mother for me in all my pictures, new and old.  

That face recognition knows my mother, my daughter, my friends, and their children from a baby up to ’90s (and beyond). Embarrassing admission: Mylio Photos is better at recognizing babies than I am.

As Mylio Photos recognizes people, it automatically builds an album for each person. The album of each person lets us see all the pictures with that person in it over an entire lifetime.  Here we see my mother over quite a few years.

People: Now & Over Time Drowning in Pictures

All of us have too many pictures.  Your phones (not just yours, but throughout your family) have thousands – perhaps tens of thousands of pictures.  Then there are all the albums with pictures taken over the years before cell phones and even computers. Oh yes, maybe boxes of prints, slides, and negatives.  Most of us feel there is no way we will ever get those pictures under control.

Every journey begins with a small step. Mylio Photos makes it easy to take those steps one at a time. With Mylio Photos, those steps fall into several simple categories: collect, consolidate, protect, organize, and enjoy.

You Don’t Have To Wait

Every day I hear from people who want to organize their pictures but need to get them in one place first. So many times, I also hear that those same people will wait because organizing feels just too hard while the pictures are so scattered. Don’t Wait.   Just getting rid of those boxes and albums alone feels good.  Mylio Photos makes it easy!

First, start collecting all those pictures together. Figure out which computers and phones have pictures your care about. Be clear that you can bring it all together even if you don’t have the time to organize it yet.

Okay, now install Mylio Photos. Pick a computer to run it on. Consider buying a large disk to hold the consolidated pictures – a 5TB disk costs just over $100. If you buy two, you can keep one in a safe place and have your pictures protected no matter what.

Even if you don’t have any organization, Mylio Photos helps you eliminate the mess.  A built-in de-duplication engine lets you get rid of those pictures that you somehow copied over and over. Get the pictures off your old phones and thumb drives. A declutter tool helps you find and deal with similar pictures. And, best of all, you are in control of your pictures, not the other way around.

We all dream of getting our pictures back under control. Take the first step: Get Mylio Photos on your computer, smartphone, or tablet. Bring some photos, videos, and documents into Mylio Photos, add events, tag a few faces, and see how it feels.  

A month (or even a few weeks) after, you’ll be glad you made this first step. You’ll connect more devices to Mylio Photos, bring more “memories” together, and finally have a complete story of your life in one safe library. 

And if you ever change your mind and decide to stop using Mylio Photos, your photos, videos, and documents will always stay with you. You will not be locked in a “cloud” and will still be free to enjoy your memories whenever you want.