Before I built TinyMoments, I did what any sensible person would do: I looked at what was already out there. I've written about that before — the existing family album apps were complicated, expensive, or quietly helping themselves to your family's privacy. Sometimes all three.
But there was one more thing that bothered me, and I haven't talked about it yet: they were all so incredibly boring.
Grey menus. Grey buttons. Endless white space. Opening them felt like logging into software at the office. And this was supposed to be the place where you keep your kids' first steps, their first words, the silly things they say at the dinner table. Those moments are full of colour. The app holding them shouldn't look like an expense report.
I wanted none of that.
Go on, try it: tap a colour.
Your colour, your mood
In TinyMoments, you choose your own background colour. Soft blue, soft green, sunny yellow, pink, purple, turquoise, orange, red — or classic white if that's your thing, and Night Mode for browsing in the evening once the kids are finally asleep.
And it's not a choice you make once and forget. Change it whenever you like, to whatever fits your mood that day. A yellow Monday, a calm blue Sunday. It's your family album — it should feel like yours.
Every child has their own colour
This one I insisted on. Every child in TinyMoments gets their own colour, used for their avatar and their name throughout the app.
Any parent with more than one child knows that each one has their own personality from day one. My eldest son is clearly red. My youngest is much more blue. Don't ask me to explain it — you just know. So now, when I scroll through our moments, I can tell at a glance whose moment is whose, before I've even read a word.
Cheerful, from the first tap to the hundredth scroll
Colour is only part of it. You'll find fun emojis throughout TinyMoments — in the menus, in the messages, in the little nudges that remind you to capture a moment. Small touches, but they add up to an app that feels friendly instead of functional.
Whether you're adding a brand-new moment or looking back at ones you captured years ago, I wanted the experience to be cheerful every single time. Adding a memory should feel like a small celebration, not like filling in a form. And rediscovering one should feel like opening a shoebox full of old photos — not like searching a file server.
That goes for the web too. The same colours and the same cheerful feel carry over to app.tinymoments.io, so your family album looks and feels like your family album, whichever screen you open it on.
A little colour in a grey world
Have you noticed how grey the world is becoming? Look at the cars on any street: fifty shades of grey, with the occasional white or black for variety. Almost every other colour has quietly disappeared.
I didn't want TinyMoments to follow that trend. Flipping through a family album has always been one of life's small joys — the laughing, the pointing, the “look how small you were!” The digital version deserves to be just as much fun.
So if TinyMoments can bring a little extra colour into your life, even if it's just for a few minutes each evening, then it's doing exactly what I built it to do.