For all those physical mementos of childhood, Savor has you covered.  But most of us have a combination of physical and digital mementos – and for those digital ones – Tinybeans offers a great and comprehensive solution. 

There are number of apps for sharing kids’ special moments with a smaller, more intimate circle than all of your Facebook followers.  It’s great for grandparents because you don’t need a social media account to use it, a simple e-mail will do.  They can select how often they want updates of the kids and they go straight to their inbox.  If you want to share the photos on social media, all the basic options from Facebook to Instagram are there with the touch of a button. 

But what most impressed us about Tinybeans is that, like Savor, they don’t just help you share your memories, they help you organize them—easily.  It’s not just a photo sharing app, it’s an app that helps you organize the digital trove of photos we are all creating and also overwhelmed by.

When you first set up Tinybeans, they ask you a couple of basic questions about your kids, such as ages and birthdays.  It instantly creates a “file” for each kid, so that when you enter a new photo, you can easily tick off which of the kids is in a given photo.  It also prompts you with labels, such as milestones or “firsts” which conveniently lets you mark a specific occasion (first steps or your height and weight at a certain age).

We have all had the experience of searching for a certain photo of our kids among the 1000-5000 we take in a year.  But just like the labels The Library provides to help you sort and locate items, Tinybeans makes organizing these items easy.  Whether you take a photo in the app or add it from your photos, it automatically appears on a calendar of the month.  If you want to have a picture a day or create a journal from specific dates, you can see at a glance what dates you have covered, and where there are holes. We love this feature. 

We started with the basic version, which is free on the app store, but for $8/month or $50 per year, we found the premium version was worth it.  First, it allows you to upload a bunch of photos at once.  This was key for things like our pumpkin patch visit, when we wanted to share a lot of photos.  We also love that it freed us from the 30 second time-limit on video uploads, so we don’t have to spend extra time deciding which moments have to be spliced off. 

Like Savor, it’s clear a lot of thought went into the details of this app. And while we're all about collecting and organizing physical mementos and memories, those digital ones deserve just as much attention. 

About the Author

Jenny Nevins co-founded Savor in 2014 after searching for a better way to hold onto her own kids' keepsakes and coming up empty. A former ACLU lawyer turned self-described organizing queen, she writes about estate planning, family preparedness, and keepsake organization.