Life Archive Format

NOTE This website is a demo of the Life Archive Format

A Life Archive Format (LAF) format, an open specification for creating portable, file-based personal archives.

Whether you're building

• a personal website
• a blog
• a photography portfolio
• a recipe collection
• a travel journal
• a family archive
• a documentation site
• or a knowledge base

a .life folder archive keeps your content in a portable, application-independent format.

The Life Archive app is the open source MIT-licensed reference website renderer of the .life format. The application reads the archive and presents it as a beautiful website without modifying the underlying content. Access the Git Hub repository for the Life Archive app at https://github.com/life-archive/life-archive-app.

Features

• Open Source / MIT License
• Open Life Archive Format .life file format
• Read-only archive rendering
• Markdown entries
• SEO friendly
• Photo albums with automatic thumbnail generation
• Photo albums with masonry, grid and photo book layouts
• Curated collections
• Timeline view
• Full archive search
• Multiple color themes
• Multi-language support
• Multi-tenant hosting from a single app
• Responsive design

Screenshots

Select any screenshot to open the full-size image. Here are some examples of the Life Archive App rendering a .life folder. It can render photo albums from files, blogs from markdown entries and store and manage any files that can be linked to from entries, albums or collections.

Personal archive	Recipe archive

Album grid layout	Album masonry layout	Album photo-book layout

View the complete Screenshot album

Start Exploring

Learn how the portable format works or follow the practical guides for running the reference application.

Life Archive Format	Life Archive App
Format overview	App overview
Archive root, life.json, and README.md	Installation
Entries	Configuration
Collections	Single-archive and multi-host modes
People and places	Deployment
Albums	Operations and troubleshooting
Files, media, and archive links

Philosophy

Most of us accumulate a lifetime of stories, photographs, documents and memories, yet they end up scattered across many different applications and online services. Over time those services change, disappear or make it difficult to move your information elsewhere.

Life Archive takes a different approach. The archive is the important part. It lives in an open, file-based format that is easy to understand, back up and keep for the long term. The application is simply a way to browse and publish that archive.

By separating the archive from the software, your content remains portable. You are free to use today's application, tomorrow's application, or build your own, while keeping the same archive throughout.

The Life Archive format is meant to be simple, open and a long term archival format to store a person's life stories, photographs, places, people, files, collections and memories. It is not a database or a cloud service. It is a folder of Markdown files, media files and metadata that can be copied, backed up, versioned, rendered or edited by different tools.

Open Format

The Life Archive Format is intentionally simple.

A typical archive looks like:

MyArchive.life/
    life.json
    README.md
    entries/
    collections/
    albums/
    files/

Life Archive App Requirements

The Life Arhive app runs on a Node.js NextJS server. It can be run locally or deployed to a cloud service. The server runs on a VM with just 1 GB RAM available. (For example the smallest $5 linode VM)

Contributors are welcome

Interested in improving the renderer or creating an app to read and write the Life Archive format, contributions and PRs are welcome.