Late last year, I ran out of space on my 100 GB Google storage subscription and had to upgrade. The culprit? Mostly photos and videos. Years of memories I'd carefully kept because I couldn't bring myself to delete them.
And that's just my personal collection.
My family also has a shared drive, where we've been collecting home videos my parents took from the time I was about three years old. We've even converted our old VHS tapes to digital files. That collection is now nearly a terabyte.
Almost a terabyte of family memories.
You'd think with all those videos, I'd have an incredible collection of favourite moments ready to watch whenever I wanted. But if you asked me to find my favourite videos from the last few years, I'd probably struggle.
Not because those moments aren't there. Quite the opposite. They're somewhere among thousands of other videos, spread across years of folders and cloud storage.
Photo albums are still a hit
When my boyfriend and I first started dating, we did what I imagine a lot of couples do. We pulled out the family photo albums.
Not the nearly one-terabyte family drive. Not the folders of digitised VHS recordings. The actual photo albums.
And there's a reason for that.
They were right there, easy to pick up and flick through. Everything was nicely organised, with memories from different stages of my life together in one place. There was something lovely about sitting together, turning the pages, pointing at old photographs and telling the stories behind them.
No searching through folders. No trying to remember what year something happened. No scrolling endlessly to find the right file.
Just memories, right in front of us.
Eventually, we did organise a movie night to watch some of those old family videos. It was wonderful seeing moments from years ago come back to life. But even after spending an entire evening watching them, we'd barely scratched the surface.
I couldn't help thinking about all the beautiful moments still hiding in that drive. The funny conversations, the family celebrations, how my grandpa sang at almost every family function, and how embarrassingly eager I was to sing under the tree every Christmas.
How many of those moments would we ever watch again?
Cloud storage is a black hole
Our phones have made recording life incredibly easy. We film birthdays, holidays, weddings, first steps, silly dances, pets doing ridiculous things, and all the little moments that make us smile.
And that's wonderful. But what happens afterwards?
We save the videos to our phones. Eventually, we run out of space. We move them to the cloud, or upgrade our storage subscriptions. And for the most part, they stay there.
We haven't lost them. Technically, we've done exactly what we were supposed to do. We've kept them safe.
But somewhere along the way, storing our memories has become easier than actually enjoying them.
Meanwhile, physical photo albums have survived generations for a reason. They're tangible, easy to share, and they invite us to sit down, turn the pages and remember.
We don't need to know the filename of our fifth birthday photograph to find it. We just open the album.
Why can't we make revisiting videos easy?
When I set out to build Nokoru, I wanted to combine the things I love about traditional photo albums with everything that makes videos so special.
I've always loved the moving portraits in the Harry Potter films, and since photographs still can't move on their own, I reached for the next best thing: technology.
I wanted the feeling of holding a real book, turning its pages and discovering old memories, but with the ability to bring those moments back to life.
You choose your favourite photos and videos and create a beautiful, physical video photobook. For the videos, you pick a frame to print on the page. Then, when you want to relive that moment, you open the free Nokoru app and point your phone at the photograph. The app recognises the picture and plays the video you've paired with it, sounds and all.
It's the closest I could get to magic :)
No QR codes covering your photographs. No searching for the original video in your cloud storage.
And when you put your phone away, it's still a real photobook. One you can leave on your coffee table, bring out when family visits, or give to someone you love.
That part was important to me. I didn't want to replace photo albums with another screen. I wanted to give them something extra.
Making room for the memories that matter
I know Nokoru isn't going to magically organise the nearly one terabyte of videos my family has collected over the years. And I don't think every video we take needs to go into a photobook.
But I do think the special ones deserve somewhere better than a forgotten folder.
The video of your grandparents laughing together. The sound of your child saying their first words. That best man's speech that had you crying with laughter on your wedding day. That completely ordinary family afternoon that, years later, you'd give anything to experience again.
Those are the moments I'd love us to revisit more often.
Not just because our phones happen to remind us of them, or because we stumbled across an old file. But because they're part of our lives, sitting on a shelf, ready to be enjoyed whenever we want.
I started Nokoru because I wanted to make that possible.
And maybe, next time someone asks to see my childhood videos, instead of digging through nearly a terabyte of files, I'll be able to reach for a book.
Just like I always have with our family photographs.
Because memories shouldn't just be stored. They deserve to be relived.
AnitaFounder of Nokoru