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Memories. Stuck

The idea for fotosca started as a way to have some sort of reasonable way to share, show, display and view the thousands of pictures we had taken over the years.

All the solutions out there seemed to get bogged down when the number of pictures went into the thousands.

The pictures were hidden from view, stuck on some storage device. We tried the picture frames with SD cards, which didn't have a long life. Worse, who has time to change the pictures every once in a while? How do you choose? Why couldn't we just have some frame on the wall which went through everything?

What if we could organize pictures well enough so we could choose some group or category -- the "holiday trip in 2013" or "when the baby was born."

Then the problem got bigger. Not only were we taking pictures on a camera or two -- now the kids had cameras. And perhaps an iPod, or phone or tablet -- all with cameras. All generating new images. And we wanted to keep them all. Obviously, some of these pictures were blurry, some were silly or pictures of the inside of one's pocket. But most of them we wanted to save -- and put together as the group of family memories. And then we went on holiday with friends and family. And they wanted to share their pictures with us and we wanted to share our pictures with them. Then it was all a jumbled mess. Pictures on the phone, some on the laptop; then most of them made it to the big storage on the home computer. Or did the pictures from my phone or her phone get stored?

Sure, you can eventually get all of these pictures together. In one place. Then you have to worry about whether your storage device--your hard drive--is going to live to see tomorrow. Do you really want your wedding pictures on one computer? Now you have to find a way to back it up. So you need two or three times the space, just to be safe. But really, you should copy everything onto some other disk and store it in a fire and security safe. How often does one have time to do that? Can you really trust the $100 5TB drives with your precious memories?