Digitapes is an open-source, open-design, personal media system to protect and cherish your favourite memories.

By establishing a "digitapes standard" - any digitapes compatible services can be used to create, store, transmit, preserve, montage or print out your photo and video albums from your phone.

You can get involved by checking out our github repository, where the code and discussions take place.

Digitapes Github

The digitapes system

You can create and store a digitape anywhere, then use it for any compatible service. We are currently building a phone app for easy "share to" functionality, as well as DIY roll-it-yourself storage options.

With just the open source app and DIY-storage, you and your friends can all share photos and videos of a holiday together, just like you'd share photos in messenger. That digitape can then be sent to a photo-album service to be made into a physical thing, or a simple online montage service will put it to music and upload it to youtube. Easy as the click of a button.

Interconnecting services

There is also the possibility for you to run a digitape service for others. For example:

• Once you create a digitape, you could send it to some digital archival service, who could burn it onto DVD for you.
• There could also be a service that would turn all your historic photos and videos into a digitape.
• A service could take a digitape and turn it into a montage to host it on youtube.
• A different service might make the same digitape into a slideshow that you can share with friends and family.

The goal of Digitapes is to provide a standard protocol that interconnecting systems can interact with. This means A tape produced from one service can be used in any other service. The data is yours and should not be locked into any particular offering.

Why digitapes

Digitapes exists for two reasons:

• To make it easier to create and share photo albums, with others, that are about a particular topic.
• To make it easier to use and preserve those photo albums, in creating and sharing things such as montages, photo albums, digital archives, and the like.

Digitapes arose from finding it difficult to correlate photos based on a topic (such as a birth of a child, or a family holiday) across different devices and different cloud services.

Many phone services (such as Google Photos, or iCloud) work on a "camera roll" principle: every photo you take is stored, and later, catergorised into certain topics. This can lead to false positives (ie: wrong images making their way into albums) and also includes vendor lock in with the cloud provider.

After digging out some old super-8 and VHS tapes from the attic and watching childhood memories, we've realised that we need a similar open standard that can preserve and collate photos and video from our current generation, into the future.