A week or so ago, I was introduced to a new website and capability called memo. It is a simple function – adding audio to the photos in your photo library.
I contacted the creator, Maxine Gill, and asked her to write a few paragraphs about the site:
Preserving Family History in Your Own Voice: Meet memo
If you’ve ever tried to put together a family photo album or build out a family history site, you know how much of the work is just tracking things down. Who has the photos? Which decade is this from? And most frustratingly — who are these people, and what was actually happening that day? We spend hours, sometimes years, reconstructing stories that the person who was there could have told in two minutes. The gap isn’t the photos. It’s the voices behind them.
memo, a new app from a company called Something Good, takes a simple approach to closing that gap. Rather than asking you to sit down and organize your memories as a project, it builds a small habit into your daily life. You pick a photo already on your phone, the app asks you a short question about it, and you answer out loud in your own words, the way you’d tell it to your daughter or your nephew. You can add a piece of music and invite other family members to record their own take on the same moment. Over time, without any grand archiving effort, you’re building exactly the kind of layered, voiced record that genealogists wish their ancestors had left behind.
For anyone working on family history, the practical value is straightforward: start using it now with the older relatives in your life. A parent or grandparent narrating their own photos — even casually, even briefly — is irreplaceable in a way that no amount of research can replicate later. The app launched its beta in March 2026, and the Something Good team is offering free lifetime access exclusively to readers of this blog. Head to somethinggood.io to claim your spot — no payment needed, just sign up and start recording.
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My comments:
Recognizing that this is brand new and certainly will have added features in the future, I tested it on a desktop rather than a phone, since this is where my family history photos reside. Currently, the way that I understand it, your photos are uploaded to memo, and then you can add audio. To be honest, having a second (or third) database of photos is not enticing for me. If I could embed the uploaded photo plus audio in a gallery on my family history website, that would be interesting.
At any rate, it is very early in the game for memo, and I will certainly be watching its evolution. I really like the idea of pairing an audio file with a photo. Having the ability of telling a story about a photo from 100 or 120 years ago is exciting to me.
Thanks to Maxine for introuducing us to memo. You can check it out at the website URL that she mentions above.