A guide to keep beside you — from the first saved memory to the printed page beside the original.
Archivia isn't designed to collect everything. It's designed to help you understand what matters. Every photograph, letter, recording and keepsake becomes easier to find, easier to preserve and easier to share when it has a place in your archive — and giving something its place takes moments, not afternoons. One memory saved today is an archive begun. That's all this ever asks of you.
Where each thing you care about receives a name, a place, and a promise.
When you sign in, you'll see two tabs. The Register is your archive itself — every memory you've formally kept, each with its own number and its own story. The Inbox is where new things wait: saved in a moment, sorted whenever suits you. A small badge shows how many are waiting, and there's no rush about any of them.
When something worth keeping crosses your day, tap ＋ Add to the archive. Whichever door you choose, saving takes only a moment — a line of context is always optional, and everything lands gently in the inbox.
Archivists call this accessioning — it's simply the moment something is formally received into a collection, and it's a quietly satisfying one. Open the Inbox, tap anything that's waiting, and take it in:
A record holds everything worth knowing about one thing: what it is, when it happened, who was there, where the original lives, and how safely it's kept. Open one and every part of that story is there to read — and to tend, whenever you learn something new. Change anything and tap Save record.
Type a name and tap Tag. Your archive keeps one list of people and suggests names as you type, so Nana stays one person rather than three spellings.
A film or recording can live at full quality somewhere else — an unlisted YouTube link, a shared album, a drive at home. The Where to watch field lets the record point there, which is the heart of the idea: your archive holds the record, and always knows where the original lives.
So that a photo can be found by what's in it, tap ✦ Write photo detail and AI writes one private line describing the scene. It's never printed and never appears in a book — it exists only so that "the one at the beach with the red bucket" finds the right photograph. ✦ Index photo detail in the AI sheet will quietly do this for many photos at once.
↑ contentsSome things belong together: Nana's letters, Christmas 1962, a series of paintings. A collection gathers them under one name — and a record can happily live in several at once. Collections never own their records: dissolve one, and everything in it stays exactly where it was.
Every record, the Desk, and the review sheet carry a Collections field. Type a name and tap File — existing collections are suggested as you type, and a new name simply begins a new collection. Tap ✕ on a chip to take a record back out.
Your collections appear as ◆ chips beneath the filters, each with its count. Tap one to open it — records listed earliest first, each a tap away. The ＋ Collection chip begins an empty one, ready to be filled at the Desk.
Beneath the search bar, one row of chips shows the archive by kind: Photos · Artwork & objects · Audio · Video · Words · Undated · Retired. Undated is a quiet gift — a ready-made list of records still waiting for their date.
Ask the way you'd ask a person — "Ada and Nana at the beach, around 2023" — and tap ✦ Find. It reads titles, descriptions, people and the private photo details, then shows you the records it believes you mean, with a note on how it read the question. The more photos carry a detail line, the sharper it becomes.
↑ contentsTap ⚡ Desk and Archivia deals you one record at a time, full screen — title, date, story, collections — then the next. The sparsest records come first, because that's what a desk is for. No list to scroll, nothing to lose your place in: just you, the records, and twenty minutes with a cup of tea.
The safest memory is one that exists in more than one place. Every record carries a small backup register that makes this visible: three dots showing how many copies exist, on how many kinds of media, and whether one lives away from home. The moment something is stored, your cloud copy is recorded automatically as copy 1 — the rest build gently over time.
When a photo's own data hints that the original may still be on a particular phone, Archivia will mention it — but only you can confirm a copy is real, so nothing is counted until you say so. The same holds for drive exports: the copy is recorded only after it has truly been written (section 09).
Most tools treat backup as a setting — one switch, somewhere, hopefully on. Archivia treats it as something you can see and tend, record by record, because a memory kept in three places is a memory that will still be here in thirty years.
Every copy you add is a promise kept.
An archive should never depend on any one company, app, or account — including this one. ⤓ Export copies every original in the register onto a hard drive, each file named by its catalogue number, with a register file alongside — so the drive can be read like the archive itself, with or without Archivia, decades from now.
Whoever opens the box in thirty years should find the story inside it. On any record, tap Print record card: a two-sided library catalogue card, 125×75mm — the front says what it is (category, description, date), the back carries the QR that reopens the record and its accession number. Print it at size on card stock, or choose Card as PDF for two A4 pages with cut marks that any home printer can duplex. Put it with the thing: inside the lid of the box, in the sleeve with the letter, behind the frame.
An archive's first promise is that it doesn't lose things — so Archivia has no delete button. At the bottom of every record is Retire from the register…, deliberately unhurried: it explains exactly what will happen, then asks you to type the record's number before the final step.
A retired record simply steps out of the everyday view. Its file is kept, its place in any book pages is untouched, and it waits under the Retired chip — where one tap on Restore brings it back, unchanged, whenever you like.
↑ contentsBeen building in Keeplace first? Tap ⟳ Sync book and Archivia reads your book, finds anything the register doesn't yet know, and takes it in — carrying across the dates, titles and stories the book already holds. Safe to run any time; it only ever adds. Start in the book and the archive catches up; start in the archive and the book draws from it (section 18).
↑ contentsWhere memories become pages, and pages become something you can hold.
Keeplace opens with the same sign-in as Archivia — one account carries you across both. With an account, your book follows you between devices and can draw from your archive. Or simply begin on this device, no account needed: the book lives safely in this browser and will be here when you come back. It's a lovely way to try the room before moving in — and a backup file (section 22) carries the book into an account whenever you're ready.
↑ contentsAt the top of every book is a switch between Reading and Editing. Reading mode removes the editing tools so your book feels like a finished book — the perfect way to revisit memories with family, or simply to enjoy the story you've created together. It's also, quietly, a preview of print: what you see in Reading is what the paper will say. Flick to Editing whenever you want to add, change, or move things about.
↑ contentsKeeplace keeps a shelf, not a single volume. Each book has its own pages and its own look, and they all live under the More menu: ＋ New book begins one (blank, or from a family-history skeleton with a tree, era dividers and timeline ready to fill), ✎ Rename changes the name that appears on covers, and 🗑 Delete this book asks you to be sure — and never touches your archive.
↑ contentsEvery page begins as a choice about what you want to say. Add a page (from the More menu or the ＋ on the page bar) opens the catalogue, arranged in five families, and places the new page after the one you're on:
A page is never trapped in its first shape. More → Change this page's layout converts it, and everything you've placed carries across — your photographs and words are poured into the new arrangement, never swept aside for a template.
↑ contentsTrays are pages that hold things which don't have a home yet — the book's way of honouring how remembering actually happens: in fragments, at inconvenient times, out of sequence. Nothing in a tray is a debt. It's material, resting, until you're in a book-making mood.
Signed in, Keeplace opens a window straight into your archive. Wherever you're choosing a photo for a page, look for From the archive — pick a record and it arrives on the page carrying its story with it, yours to shape like anything else in the book. This is the quiet handshake between the two: facts live in Archivia, stories are told in Keeplace, and neither ever disturbs the other.
A book feels composed when its choices are made once, for the whole volume — so that's how Keeplace works. Open More → Design and everything about the book's appearance is in one place:
Anywhere you can write, you can speak instead — tap the ◉ microphone and tell the memory the way you'd tell it aloud. The assistant can then tidy what you said into something page-ready, keeping your facts and your voice. It never invents a memory and never writes anything final: everything it drafts lands in an editable field, waiting for your eye. Its settings live under More → Memory assistant.
↑ contentsMore → Print & keep gathers everything about paper, copies and safekeeping onto five shelves:
A book doesn't have to wait until it's finished to become real. Download this page makes a print-ready PDF of just the page you're on; Print this page sends it straight out. This is the heart of the living-binder way of keeping — a book that grows one printed page at a time, filed beside the originals it describes.
Download or Print the whole book in one PDF — or just the ready pages, so a book still in progress can put its finished spreads on paper today.
Photo dates chooses whether each photograph's date appears in print. Left off, they stay in the app — like writing on the back of the photo rather than the front.
Export the text writes every title, story and catalogue row into a document — the book's words, portable. Export the photos lays out every image for saving back to your camera roll, one tap each.
A bound photo book is finished the day it's printed. A binder never has to be. Print the page about the first haircut and file it in front of the envelope holding the lock of hair. Print the letter's transcription and sleeve the letter behind it. Print the catalogue entry and keep it with the work.
The page doesn't replace the original. It gives the original context.
One account, two rooms, one circle.
Notice what's never asked of you: importing everything, sorting everything, finishing anything. Each small act leaves your collection a little more known, a little safer, a little more tangible — and that is the whole practice.
↑ contents| ✦ | AI | Wherever this star appears, AI is offering help — organising, transcribing, finding, describing. Always a suggestion into an editable field; never a decision made for you. |
| ⚡ | Desk | Cataloguing one record at a time, full screen. |
| ⤓ | Export | Originals copied to a drive, filed by catalogue number, register alongside. |
| ⟳ | Sync book | Archivia reads your Keeplace book and takes in anything the register doesn't yet know. |
| ⎙ | Something is about to become paper — a page, a book, a record card. | |
| ◉ | Record / dictate | The microphone — a voice note, or dictation into any writing field. |
| ◈ | Artwork & objects | A physical thing, photographed, with a note of where the original lives. |
| ◆ | Collection | A named set of records. One record can live in several; dissolving a collection never touches the records in it. |
| ●●● | 3-2-1 | The backup dots: three copies, two kinds of media, one offsite. Filled dots are confirmed copies. |
| A-000042 | Catalogue no. | A record's permanent number — used in file names, exports, printed cards and citations. Archivists call it an accession number. |
Save the moment.
Give it a place.
Keep it in three.
Print what matters.
This Companion will grow as Archivia does. If a page here doesn't quite match your screen, the screen is newer — and Brianna would love to hear about it. In the meantime: one memory saved today is enough. It always was.