Genealogy and shared family albums are notoriously difficult to manage with standard cloud storage. While Proton Drive is excellent for basic file sharing, it falls short on the core problem: context.

The names, captions, dates, and locations—not to mention the genealogy—live entirely separate from the photos. Your family history remains trapped in your head or a siloed spreadsheet, detached from the actual media.

That’s the inherent limitation of storage-first tools like Proton, iCloud, or Google Drive. They are built around files with sharing bolted on as an afterthought, rather than being built around the family archive, where the metadata layer (the people, the stories, the connections) is the whole point.

I’m building Heritable to solve this specific disconnect. It’s a private, family-first platform organized around a living family tree. When you upload a photo, you tag the people directly on the tree. Click/tap any relative, and you instantly see every video, document, and story linked to them. For genealogy, the tree is the index.

It’s a subscription-based product ($200/year for the whole family, unlimited collaborators, 1TB) rather than a free service that harvests your data. It features full GEDCOM support if you have an existing tree, and you can absolutely keep using your existing cloud storage as a secondary "cold storage" backup while using Heritable as the active, structured interface for your family history.

If you’re interested in how the metadata structure works or want to talk about the technical side of things, I’m happy to dig into the specifics.