We're racing the same clock you are.

From the founder

I didn't grow up caring about photographs. My childhood was unsteady, and my grandmother ended up raising me — she became a second mother. My relationships with my parents improved over time, but I lost years to anger. Years I didn't ask the questions I would have wanted answered.

Then my mother passed.

And I realized how many of those questions were no longer answerable. About people, about places, about the small ordinary stories that make up a family. The ones nobody writes down.

So I did the only thing left. I paid my cousin's son to spend weeks at my grandmother's house photographing her old albums. She wouldn't let them leave the house. He worked his way through them, one Polaroid at a time. Over five thousand pictures, digitized.

And then I had a hard drive full of strangers.

People my grandmother knows by heart. People my mother would have known by name. People I'd never met, who shared dinners and birthdays with the family long before I existed. Without their names, the photos were just decoration. Beautiful, useless decoration.

I tried the big photo-backup apps. I tried the genealogy tools. I tried building a spreadsheet. Nothing was built for the actual problem — which wasn't storage and wasn't genealogy, but identification, done collaboratively, before the people who remember are gone.

So I built KindredPics.

It's a private workspace where you draw a box around a face, type a name, and the whole family — cousins, aunts, grandparents — logs in and adds the pieces they each remember. A name here. A relationship there. A "that's not who you think it is" correction from the one cousin who was actually at that wedding.

It's the kitchen-table moment, online. Asynchronous, so grandma can do it in the morning and your sister can do it after the kids are asleep. The full story emerges from the pieces nobody could carry alone.

If you've been holding photos you can't quite identify, with relatives whose memory you don't want to lose — this is for you. The clock is real for me too. We're working on the same problem at the same time.

— Devin

KindredPics is built and operated solo from Texas. Reach me directly at support@kindredpics.com.