One shared library for your family’s photos and videos.

The Library is the shared store underneath everything else in your family space. Upload photos and videos once, sort them into folders, and they are ready wherever you need them: in an album with their stories, on a timeline event, in a time capsule or on the pages of a Memory Book.

Everyone you invite to your family space shares the same Library, and any member can upload photos and videos and create folders. It sits in private storage, and nobody outside your family space can see it. You keep ownership of everything you upload; Ancestorii holds only the limited licence it needs to run the service.

Storage is per family, not per person. Everything anyone in your family space uploads comes out of one shared pool, and one Premium subscription covers everybody. The sidebar in your dashboard shows how much of it has been used.

For context, as of October 2026 Google says each Google Account includes up to 15 GB, shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, and Apple gives everyone 5 GB of iCloud storage free. Those allowances are per person and cover everything on the account. The Free plan’s 1 GB is smaller and is meant for a chosen collection, not every picture on every phone. Premium’s 100 GB is room for whole archives and video.

Each folder has a name of up to 80 characters, an optional description of up to 300 and an optional date, so “Holiday 2026” or “Family Portraits” can carry a line about what is inside and when it is from. Open a folder and upload into it: up to 20 photos and videos at a time, dragged in or chosen from your device, with iPhone HEIC files converted to JPEG on the way.

Photos you upload straight into the Memory Book, canvas or acrylic editors are saved to the Library too, in a folder called Uncategorised, which Ancestorii creates automatically so nothing goes missing.

A simple scheme is enough: a folder for each event or year (“Spain 1987”, “Nan’s 80th”) and a few for people or themes (“Grandad’s army photos”). Our guide to organising family photos goes further.

Because they all draw on the same Library, a photo you put there only needs uploading once. The same picture can sit in an album, on a timeline and on a page of a Memory Book.

No, and the same goes for any single service. The Library of Congress advises keeping at least two copies of the photos you care about, in places as physically far apart as practical, checking them at least once a year and making new copies on fresh media every five years or when needed. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) sums it up as the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of important files, on two different types of storage, with one kept off-site.

For a family that might mean the originals on a computer, a copy on an external drive kept at a relative’s house, and a cloud backup. The Library then holds the chosen, sorted copy that the family actually looks at.

There is one more reason to keep originals. iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG when they upload, so the Library copy isn’t the original file. Apple also notes that photos copied from an iPhone to a computer may be converted unless you turn on Keep Originals (open Settings, tap Apps, tap Photos, then tap Keep Originals). Our guide to backing up family photos has more.

The Library gives your family one private place for the photos and videos you have chosen, sorted the way you want and shared with the people you invite. Albums, timelines, capsules and the print editors all draw on it, so the work of sorting pays off everywhere else.

You manage the Library on the Ancestorii website. The Free plan needs no card and isn’t a trial. Premium is £3.99 a month for the whole family and adds 100 GB, larger files, priority support, early access to new features and 10% off printed keepsakes. There are no ads, and Ancestorii doesn’t sell your data.

The Library holds what your family chooses to put in it, which is what keeps it useful. Keep your full backup elsewhere, and bring the photos that matter here.