Lore

Guides

Adding memories

A memory in Lore can be a photo, a recipe, or a recorded story. Here’s how to add each one — and what happens between tapping “submit” and seeing it in your archive.

The basics

Tap Add from the tab bar and choose what you’re contributing. Whatever the type, the flow is the same: provide the content, add what you know about it, choose which Family (or Families) it belongs to, and submit.

You don’t need to know everything. Add what you remember — a name, a rough year, where it was taken. Lore and your family’s editors can fill in the rest later. A photo with no details is still worth keeping.

Photos & scans

The heart of most archives. You can:

Then add what you know: who’s in it, roughly when it was taken, and the story behind it. Dates can be exact or approximate (“sometime in the 1980s”) — the archive understands both.

Recipes

The dish nobody could quite replicate, the handwritten card in a grandparent’s kitchen. Capture a recipe so it’s saved for the whole family:

  1. Choose Recipe from the Add menu.
  2. Photograph the recipe card, or type it in.
  3. Add a title and any notes — whose recipe it was, when it was served, what made it special.

Lore keeps the original image alongside the text, so both the words and the handwriting are preserved.

Voices & stories

Some of the best family history isn’t written down — it’s the way someone tells a story. Record audio right in Lore to capture it in their own voice. Lore can transcribe the recording, so the words become searchable while the original voice is kept forever.

This is the easiest way to gather oral history: sit with a relative, hit record, and let them talk.

Choosing which families a memory belongs to

If you’re part of more than one Family, you can submit a memory to several at once — useful for photos of kids that belong in both sides of the family. Pick the Families when you submit. Each Family then keeps its own copy in its own archive, curated independently.

What happens after you submit

Submitting doesn’t just dump a file into a folder. Each memory goes through a light editorial path so the archive stays rich and searchable:

  1. Submitted — your memory enters the Family’s queue.
  2. Enriched — Lore suggests details automatically: an estimated era, the occasion, possible people, and text read from the image. These are suggestions, always reviewable.
  3. Reviewed — an editor (or you, if you have editor access) confirms the details and tidies anything up.
  4. Published — the memory goes live to the Family and becomes eligible to surface in On This Day.

If you’re an editor, you can approve your own submissions, so there’s no waiting.

About the AI suggestions: they exist to make memories findable later — tags like “wedding” or “baptism” are what make searches like “show me every wedding photo” work. Nothing is published from a suggestion alone; a person always reviews before it goes live.

Tips for a great archive

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