This is the house manual. It explains how to move around the app and the decisions that make Origena different from a photo folder — above all what it does not do, which is usually the surprising part.
Everything that comes in here stays yours. At any moment you export the whole archive in one file — data, the tree in GEDCOM format and the photos — and take it away.
That same file comes back: you can import it into a new family, and the photos come with it. This is not a marketing promise; it is tested every time the system is updated.
A common question when you start — and the short answer is: send everything to Memories. There are three layers, and only the first is where things live.
Memories is the archive. Every photo, document, audio and video lives there, once. It is the right place for everything that comes in.
An album is a selection, not a folder. It points to photos already in Memories: the same photo can be in several albums without being duplicated, and deleting the album does not delete the photo. Think “the farm photos”, “the wedding”, “Sofia as a child”.
A scrapbook is not something you create — it is a PDF you request from an album, in the Books area. One photo per page, with who appears, when, where, and the seal saying whether the image is the original or was treated by AI.
So the path is: send to Memories → group into an Album → generate the Scrapbook.
One piece of advice worth more than the path: what gives a photo its value is not uploading it, it is the context. As you upload, say who appears, when it was and where. That is what puts the photo on the timeline, on the person's page, in search results, and inside a year's retrospective. A photo with no date stays out of retrospectives — and the book itself tells you how many were left out.
This is the heart of the product. No data appears loose: each one comes with a badge saying its origin.
The certificate records it — there is a document.
The family tells it — someone remembers, and the name of who remembered stays with it.
Suggested by AI, unconfirmed — the machine proposed it and no human confirmed.
These are different things, and Origena never mixes them. An AI suggestion never becomes a fact on its own: someone in the family has to accept it, and that acceptance is recorded with a name and a date.
The aunt says grandfather was born in 1921; the cousin says 1922. Origena does not choose on its own and deletes neither version.
The fact is marked as disputed, both versions stay visible with who said each one, and the family decides — writing down the reason. If the certificate turns up later, it promotes the documented version, and the earlier decision stays in the history.
Correcting here is never deleting: it is adding a new version on top. Open disagreements are gathered under Care for the legacy.
Every person in the family joins with a role. Contributors add but do not delete — family conflict is an expected situation, not an exception.
Items marked private appear only to whoever created them and to whoever administers (and in that case the access is recorded). A child's profile is born private and never goes public.
A guest sees only what the family marked as public: no documents, nothing private, no capsules.
When a screen is not open to your role, it says so — instead of appearing empty, as though nothing had been kept.
Click your name, at the top of the screen, to open Your account. There you turn on two-step verification, see how many devices are connected and can sign out of all of them at once.
To invite someone, two-step verification has to be on. It is not bureaucracy: inviting grants access to the whole family's memory, and that door cannot open with a password alone. Turning it on takes a minute — you scan an image with an authenticator app on your phone (or type the key) and confirm with the six numbers it shows.
Keep the recovery codes that appear afterwards. They appear only once, each works once, and they are your way back if you lose your phone. Not even we can show them again.
An invitation is valid for 14 days and only works for the e-mail you typed. Whoever accepts joins with the role you chose, and you can change or remove that access later — what the person contributed stays in the archive.
In Memories, choose the files and upload. Each one gets a progress bar, and you can cancel midway: whatever already went up stays.
The file goes from your device straight to the vault, with no intermediate copy, and the original is never altered. The thumbnail is made on your own phone.
If the connection drops, "Try again" appears with the list of what was left halfway — with no need to pick the files a second time. Sending again does not create a duplicate memory: it is the same record finishing its path.
In the gallery, a photo marked UPLOAD NOT FINISHED means exactly that: the file did not arrive. Choose the same file and send it again. PROCESSING, on the other hand, means it did arrive and is being checked — that clears on its own.
An album gathers photos that tell the same thing: a trip, a wedding, grandma's house. The photo stays one — joining an album makes no copy, and the same photo can be in several.
Create the album under Archive → Albums. To put a photo in, open the photo in the gallery and use Save to an album. Inside the album you can take any photo out — removing from an album deletes nothing: it stays in the archive.
It is the album that becomes the scrapbook on paper, under Create.
Regret a photo? Open the memory and use Delete this memory, at the end of the page. It leaves the gallery and search right away.
But it is not erased: it goes to the Bin (under Care for the legacy), from where it comes back whole, with the ties it had. What the family wrote about it stays.
The Bin also holds archived people, stories, traditions and objects. Nothing is truly erased without a deletion request.
Deleting is for whoever administers the family. Contributors add but do not remove — on purpose.
The photo you uploaded is never altered. Each treatment creates a new version, alongside, clearly marked.
Restore removes scratches, stains and noise. It does not change faces, clothes or scenery: where the photo was lost, it stays lost — missing information is better than invented information.
Colourise gives colour to a black and white photo. The colour is a guess: nobody recorded the colour of that dress, and the badge says so.
Enlarge increases definition without inventing detail, especially on faces — a reconstructed eye changes the person.
Animate is the only one that invents: it turns the photo into a short, silent video. That movement never happened. That is why the video comes out marked as AI-created and does not enter a book or an album as though it were a record.
The video has no sound on purpose: an invented voice for someone who is gone would be worse than invented movement.
"In the 40s", "around 1890", "before moving to Brasília". Origena accepts an imprecise date and keeps the imprecision, instead of guessing an exact day.
The timeline orders by what it knows and shows the precision alongside. Whatever has no date at all goes to the end, labelled — never pretending an order the data does not support.
Sitting down with someone and asking is the fastest way to save a lifetime of memory. Under Archive → Interviews you choose one of ten guides — childhood, parents, marriage, working life, advice to those who come after — and record the answer on your own phone.
You can stop and come back later: the interview stays in progress until you finish it. You can also skip questions, add your own, and write the answer instead of recording it.
The original audio is never replaced. The transcript is derived from it and can be corrected as many times as needed — and the screen always says whether the text was written by the family or transcribed by a machine.
Almost everything here looks backwards. The capsule goes the other way: you write today to be read many years from now.
While it is sealed, nobody reads it — not you, not the account owner. What the family sees is that it exists, who wrote it and when it opens. The content is encrypted with a key that does not live in the database.
An attached photo disappears from the gallery and from search until it opens, and comes back to exactly the privacy it had before. You can only seal photos you sent yourself: the capsule is not for hiding other people's archive.
Guardians are the people who can take over the archive if you are gone. Nothing happens automatically: a request needs a quorum among the guardians, a review by a person from the platform, and a window for objections — and a single guardian who disagrees stops it.
You are notified by e-mail and can stop it yourself at any time, even after approval.
The archive becomes a PDF to print. Paper has no password, depends on no provider and does not expire.
Family book — one chapter per person, with the facts and the origin of each one.
One person's book — to give as a present.
Scrapbook — an album on paper, one photo per page.
A year in review — what happened, and the year in photographs.
Every book is the view of whoever asked for it: two relatives with different roles get different books. The colophon says what is an account, what is a document and what came from a machine — and how many photos were left out for lacking a date.
AI operations use credits: restoring, colourising, enlarging and animating a photo, transcribing an interview, writing a biography.
The price appears first. You see what it costs, you confirm, and only then does the amount leave the wallet. If the model refuses the work — which happens, and is a legitimate answer — the credit comes back automatically.
No credit is charged for: keeping, searching (including search by meaning), the tree, the timeline, the PDF books and exporting the archive. That is the family's own archive, not a machine operation.
Inviting relatives is also free on every plan: the limit is space and AI operations, never people.
A photo that will not open, an import that fails, a job stuck: the system would rather say it broke than pretend it worked. If a file did not upload, the media stays marked as pending instead of appearing ready and empty.
What the family sees as an error always has a reason written in plain language, and a way out: Try again. When the device is offline, the screen says No connection — nothing you wrote was lost.
If the reason does not help you understand what to do, that is a defect in the system — worth telling us.
Is something missing here? Ask Augusto — this page exists to be corrected.