Why a personal archive needs a permanent home

Six months ago a sunrise photograph existed in exactly one place: a Telegram chat, compressed, searchable only by scroll. Today it renders on this site with its date, its place, and the story of the morning it captured.

The trigger was reading Google’s own changelog — photoslibrary.readonly removed for every client on March 31, 2025. Not a bug. A policy. Any archive that depends on one company’s goodwill is not an archive; it is a lease.

So the rule here is simple: chat apps are inputs, the site is home. Send a photo to the bot, and it becomes a memory record with provenance. Post on Facebook, and the mirror arrives here too. The platforms can keep their copies; we keep the original.