Entries
16 entries written over 2 years.
2026
Life Archive Format Overview
The Life Archive Format (LAF) is an open, portable, file-based format for personal archives. A life archive is an ordinary folder containing JSON, Markdown, and media files. It…
Archive Root, life.json, and README.md
Every life archive begins with a root directory. The root holds the manifest, the archive introduction, and the standard content folders. life.json life.json is the archive mani…
Entries in Life Archive Format
Entries are the primary written records in a life archive. An entry can represent a story, journal note, recipe, essay, document description, event, article, or any other item w…
Collections in Life Archive Format
Collections create curated groups inside an archive. They are useful for topics, projects, family branches, recipe categories, travel journals, exhibitions, reading paths, and a…
People and Places in Life Archive Format
People and places give stories a stable context. Instead of repeating a person's biography or a place description in every entry, an archive can create one entity and refer to i…
Albums in Life Archive Format
Albums preserve groups of photographs with as little metadata overhead as possible. In life/0.1 , an album is a directory under albums/ ; it does not require a Markdown file or…
Files, Media, and Archive Links
The files/ directory stores assets that are not organized as photo albums. It can contain images, audio, video, PDFs, scans, text documents, and other files that belong with the…
Life Archive App Overview
Life Archive App is the open-source reference web application for the Life Archive Format. It reads a .life folder from the local filesystem and presents the archive as a public…
Installing Life Archive App
Life Archive App is a Next.js server application. A local installation needs Node.js with npm, a copy of the application repository, and at least one valid .life archive. The pr…
Configuring Life Archive App
Tracked application defaults are centralized in src/defaults.ts . Deployment-specific overrides belong in the root .env.local , which Git ignores. Archive-specific identity and…
Single-Archive and Multi-Tenant Modes
Life Archive App supports two archive-routing modes. Single-archive mode serves one .life folder for every request. Multi-host mode chooses an archive from the request hostname,…
Deploying Life Archive App
Deploy Life Archive App as a Next.js server application , not as a static export. Pages are server rendered as needed, and archive files, album media, generated thumbnails, and…
Operations and Troubleshooting
Life Archive App is intentionally light on operational state. The .life folder is the source of truth, while generated thumbnails live under systemPath and may be recreated. Goo…
2025
The Digital Legacy We Are Accidentally Leaving Behind
When previous generations left behind a box in the attic, it usually contained the pieces of a life. There might be old photographs with handwritten notes on the back, letters e…
You Don't Own Your Digital Life. You Merely Rent Access to It.
There was a time when buying software meant owning it. You installed it from a CD, kept it on your computer, and used it for as long as your operating system allowed. Your photo…
Why I Use Life Archive Alongside Google Photos
Google Photos is where I keep all of my photographs. It backs them up automatically, organizes them by date, recognizes faces, and makes it remarkably easy to find almost any im…