A virtual scrapbook for baby’s most monumental moments

Tiny Memories is an app for mobile platforms that lets you take photos you take of your newly-born tot, organize them, and write about them. Whether it’s their first word, their first tooth or their first step, this app adds a bit of life to the beginning of a parent-child journey. Nothing stops aunts or uncles from using it, either, although some of the features aren’t suited to that.

Love, Mom

From the moment you start using the app, you’ll notice that it’s practically made to be a scrapbook… just a very organized one. One of the main features is categories: you can drop photos in categories such as Birthdays or First Time Milestones.

What the app really does, though, is let you add all manner of text to your photos – a beautifully simple way to personalize them! You can even use it for non-baby photos, in a pinch!

For all that Tiny Memories can do, though, it’s rather hard to actually edit the photos you put in it. The app doesn’t feature many stickers to call its own, though you can do pretty well just drawing yourself. It’s perhaps for this reason that it’s integrated with Instagram: you can use the hashtag #TinyMemories to share it with the world and the developers. Putting the two apps together certainly does make each one feel more complete!

An app that’s not long in the tooth

Tiny Memories is bouncing-off-the-walls speedy. Only the main interface, where you view a lot of photos zoomed out, takes a moment to work and bring you to a milestone you select. The actual process of editing baby photos is more than smooth enough; the only problem is that as noted above, you may need a slower or harder-to-use app if you really want to make those photos shine.

Organizationally, it’s pretty much perfect. If the app doesn’t make things like dates, or what each photo signals, visible enough for you, then all you need to do is type or draw on the photo itself. “Or” being the operative word here: both work very well. The app is advertised as coming with a variety of lavish fonts, and it certainly comes with a few, but there’s nothing quite like using your own handwriting, which you can do.

The only problem is that managing more than one “photo journal”, if you have two or more kids’ worth of memories, can be somewhat difficult. Again, though, you can at least get around this with some creative writing!

Best for not-quite-solemn recordings

The fact that not many art assets are included means you can’t lavish your baby with virtual flowers (and it might not be a great idea to do so with most real flowers!). Thus, if you’re looking for an app to make newly-born artwork, it might be best to start elsewhere. But as the title of this review notes, Tiny Memories makes for a fantastic virtual scrapbook, from how it’s organized to the oodles of text features it provides.