Hello and Welcome to Collectionaire!
(You may also want to view the Introductory Videos in the first Help category.)
Collectionaire is a new way to organize your most cherished family photos, videos and keepsake memories so that these "best of" treasured items are never lost and always accessible and shareable on your phone, tablet or desktop computer. You'll be able to create a dedicated collection for each member of your family, from cherished memories of each child to legacy tributes to grandparents and ancestors. You'll also create a separate collection for each family.
Not a photo storing service
Collectionaire does not store your photos. Instead, your media will reside in one or more photo-sharing cloud services, such as Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flickr, SmugMug, etc. for photos; and Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon cloud or other site for videos. You can use almost any, or several, different photo-sharing cloud services for your media. Collectionaire is then the app through which you'll organize and access them. It's important to understand that your photos and videos are not transferred to Collectionaire but always remain, and are viewed, in the photo-sharing cloud site where they reside.
A visual family tree hub to your collections
At its core then, Collectionaire is a simple visual hub in the form of a family tree, directly linking you to the photo storage cloud location where you'll view the media. Think of it as a customized Table of Contents where your family tree is the interface to the keepsake documents that pertain to a specific family member or the collective family. Clicking on a person will take you to their personal collection of keepsake memories. Clicking on a circle icon linking a couple takes you to their family collection.
Why is it better than what I have now?
Your photos may already be in Apple Photos, Google Photos or other site, but these are simply not designed to organize the collective family's photo and video memories over the years. And you'll probably use multiple cloud locations for storing your broad collection. For example, there is a fantastic feature for long form (over 15 minutes) videos when stored in Google Drive, Vimeo or YouTube. In these sites, you can link the viwer to a specific starting point anywhere in the video using Collectionaire's "linking" process. And with Collectionaire, photos, videos and digital albums pertaining to one person or one family are all brought to one place, regardless of location or format. You'll be able to organize everything about a child's early years through adulthood; create a legacy tribute to a deceased loved one for all to remember; or bring together the memories of all of your cherished family events and vacations in one place.
Use the best of the best
Our "Best Practices" suggest that your photo library be stored in one cloud site and videos perhaps in another. But beyond these, there are dozens of exciting new photo, audio, and video sharing apps being created each year that you can tap into. And Google, Apple, Amazon and others continue to bring new features to their apps trying to out-do the other in photo and video management. But with Collectionaire as your central hub you won't have to keep moving your files to different cloud services to be able to use some of the latest apps and features available.