Looking for a family album app? Mosaikin is for one family gathering

Is Mosaikin a family album app?

Not in the way most people mean it, and it is better that you hear that from us than find it out later. A family album app is somewhere the family keeps adding to for years: the baby’s first steps, the school play, every Christmas, one feed that grows with you. Mosaikin is built for something narrower.

Each Mosaikin event is one occasion with its own link, its own guest list and its own photo allowance. It opens before the day, fills up while everyone is together, and is kept for 5 years on an upgraded event. When the occasion is over, the album is finished, and the family takes its copy home. If you want one place for every photo of the next ten years, a long-running family album is the right tool. If you want every photo from one day, read on.

The allowance belongs to the event, not to your account, so the next gathering gets its own fresh album rather than a crowded corner of an old one. See How many photos can my event hold?

When is one album for one gathering the better tool?

Whenever the family is all in one place, for one day or one weekend, and every cousin, aunt and grandchild is taking photos on their own phone. Those are the days the family remembers, and the days the photos scatter fastest.

• A family reunion. Branches of the family who have not met in years, each with half the story. One album is where the halves meet.
• A christening or a naming day. A gentle day with the grandparents at the centre, and a guestbook that becomes a book of wishes for the child.
• Grandma’s 80th. The party, the speeches, and the old photos everyone brings along.
• A golden or ruby wedding anniversary. The wedding photos from fifty years ago beside the ones taken that afternoon.

Each of those works the same way: one event, one link shared once in the family chat, and everyone adds to the same album. A gathering across a whole weekend is still one event.

Can every generation join?

Yes, and this is where it matters most for a family. Nobody downloads anything and nobody creates an account. The phone’s own camera reads the QR code and opens the album in the browser, and a photo is on its way within a few taps. See How do I join an event?

• For anyone who cannot scan, there is the short link to type, and the access code if you have protected the gallery. Codes ignore capitals, so a grandparent typing it in lower case is fine. See Where do I find my event’s access code?
• Old photos upload too. A scan of a wedding photo from the seventies, a photo of a print, a screenshot from a cousin abroad: nothing checks that a picture came from a camera. If it opens on the phone, it will almost certainly upload. See What kinds of photo and video can I upload?
• Videos in MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 50 MB each, sit in the same album: the speech, the candles, the first dance at the anniversary.

Put the live slideshow on the television and the room watches the old photos and the new ones arrive together. For the older relatives who did not bring a phone at all, that screen is how they see everything.

Will it stay private to the family?

That is your choice, made on the Sharing tab. A Protected gallery asks for the access code before anyone sees anything; a Private one opens only for you, your moderators and guests who have joined with the code, and the link on its own shows nothing. Every photo is cleaned of its location data and passes a safety check before it appears. See What do the three gallery privacy settings mean?

What does the family keep?

Upgrade the event and its Keepsakes tab gives the family four things to keep:

• Every photo as one ZIP, at full display size with camera metadata removed, each file named after the relative who took it. See What is in the photo archive?
• The guestbook as a printable PDF: with the Social Gathering template it is called the Quote Board, and it fills with memories, stories and the jokes only the family understands.
• A highlight reel: an MP4 built from the best-liked photos, the keepsake to send to the relatives who could not make it.
• A word cloud of the words everyone used most. See What is the word cloud?

On an upgraded event the archive stays available for 5 years. A free event is kept for six months after the event date, as the Host Terms set out. Either way, download the family’s copy early and keep it somewhere safe: it is one click and one file.

Creating the event is free, with up to 30 photos. To keep everything from the day, upgrade that one event with a single payment to Plus £25; a very large family can go to Premium £89. No subscription, nothing renews, and guests always join free. See pricing.

Wondering whether the family chat would do? A WhatsApp group or Mosaikin sets out where each one is the better tool, and party photo sharing covers the birthdays and the baby showers in more detail.