Your Photos.
Not Our Compressed Versions.
Many photo services compress every image you upload — often without telling you. The quality loss is invisible today, but over decades of re-compression and format changes, it compounds.
We think a 100-year vault should respect the quality you trusted us with.
The Quiet Erosion Nobody Talks About
Google Photos' default "Storage Saver" mode applies lossy compression to every upload — downscaling photos larger than 16 megapixels and permanently discarding image data to reduce file sizes. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp compress more aggressively still. In every case, the compression is irreversible: the original quality cannot be recovered from the compressed version.
For casual snapshots, the difference is invisible to the naked eye. But for the photos that actually matter — a grandmother's handwritten recipe card, a 1940s wedding portrait your cousin had professionally scanned at 600 DPI, the last photo taken of your father — lossy compression discards exactly the fine detail that makes these images irreplaceable.
A professional scan of a 10×8 inch photo at 600 DPI produces a 28-megapixel file. Upload that to a service that caps at 16 megapixels and you've lost 40% of the resolution your scanning service carefully captured. The original quality is gone, and there's no way to get it back.
More Photos Than Ever. Fewer Preserved Than You'd Think.
The numbers tell a story of abundance and fragility.
photos taken in 2024
That's roughly 5.3 billion per day — 94% on smartphones.
Source: Photutorial
of people no longer print photos
Digital-only storage means a single device failure or account closure can erase years of memories.
Source: PPA National Survey
annual hard drive failure rate
Even enterprise-grade drives fail. Over five years, the odds of losing an unbacked-up drive are significant.
Source: Backblaze 2024 Drive Stats
"We think about digitising things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don't understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised."
Vint Cerf
Co-inventor of TCP/IP, Vice President at Google. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2015.
Two Copies, One Promise
When you enable Archival Quality mode, every uploaded photo creates two files.
Display Copy
Compressed for fast loading. Smooth scrolling through galleries, quick sharing, responsive on every device. This is what you see day-to-day.
Archival Original
The full-resolution file, exactly as you uploaded it. Every pixel, every detail, preserved untouched. Available for download whenever you need it.
How It Works
Enable Archival Quality
One toggle in Settings. Your vault switches to dual-storage mode.
Upload as Normal
Photos, scans, camera shots — everything works the same way it always did.
Two Copies, One Purpose
A fast-loading display copy for browsing, and the full-resolution original preserved exactly as uploaded.
Built for Professional Scans
When a scanning service delivers high-resolution digitisations of your family's printed photos, those scans represent real investment — in time, in equipment, in expertise.
We built Archival Quality mode with scanning businesses in mind. When they deliver a 600 DPI scan of a 1952 wedding photo, that file stays at 600 DPI in your vault. The fine grain of the photographic paper, the handwriting on the back, the subtle colour shifts — all preserved exactly as scanned.
A scanning service shouldn't have to wonder whether their careful work will be silently downscaled the moment it reaches your vault. With Archival Quality mode, it won't be.
Resolution Standards Change. Your Originals Won't.
Display technology has improved relentlessly for decades. Standard definition gave way to HD, HD to 4K, 4K to 8K. Each leap makes previously "fine" images look softer on newer screens.
Photos compressed to today's standards will be viewed on displays that don't exist yet. The only safe bet is preserving the highest quality you have. By keeping the original, you're not optimising for today's technology — you're preserving for whatever comes next.
What Makes This Different
Your Storage, Your Choice
Archival Quality mode uses approximately twice the storage per photo — because you're storing two copies. We don't hide this. It's right there in your Settings, with a clear breakdown of what you're using.
Not every photo needs archival treatment. Casual phone snaps work perfectly with standard compression. Professional scans of irreplaceable prints? That's where Archival Quality earns its keep.
You can switch between Balanced and Archival Quality any time. Existing photos aren't affected — only new uploads follow the current setting.
Start Preserving Your Originals
Your family's photos deserve better than silent compression. Enable Archival Quality and know that what you upload is what you'll always have.