Keepr Here is the single most useful thing to do after signing up: create a Family Hub and invite the people you live with. Your partner. Your kids, if they're old enough to have phones. That's it.
It takes a couple of minutes and it's free — and it's the difference between Keepr being useful immediately and being another app you set up alone and abandoned.
Why start with your household rather than the whole family#
The usual instinct is to build everything first: create albums, organise years of photos, then invite everyone once it looks impressive. That's the version that doesn't work.
Family photo apps fail in a predictable way. One person does all the setting up and all the uploading, everyone else is an audience who mostly forgets to look, and eventually the organiser works out it would be less effort to send photos in a message. The app becomes a chore with one person doing it.
A household hub avoids that from the start, because the people in it aren't an audience — they're already taking photos of the same children on the same days. As soon as your partner adds one photo you didn't have, the thing is working, and it keeps working without anyone being persuaded of anything.
Grandparents, cousins and friends can come later, through circles or by joining the hub on a larger plan. Nothing about starting small closes any of that off.
It's free for three people#
The Starter Hub gives you 10 GB of shared storage for up to three people, at no cost and with no card. That's enough to see whether your family actually uses it, which is the only thing worth finding out first.
If it works, larger hub plans hold more people and much more storage.
What your family sees when they join#
They get an invitation, they accept, and they're in — the shared albums are there, with everything already in them. Nobody has to be walked through a setup.
Until someone accepts, their invitation shows as still waiting. If a few days go by, assume it went to a spam folder or a phone they never check rather than that they weren't interested — sending it again through a channel they actually use is usually all it takes.
Everyone can add, not just you#
This is the part worth telling people when you invite them: a hub is not your feed. Every member can add photos to its shared albums, and what they add is there for everyone else.
If you're the one who has always organised the photos, this is the point at which you stop being the only one doing it.
Storage is shared, and it's the hub's#
Photos in a hub album use the hub's storage, not the personal allowance of whoever uploaded them. Someone on a free personal account can add photos to a hub all day without running out of their own space.
That also means the hub's plan decides the quality settings for everything in it — see Photo and video quality.
You still get a private corner#
Joining a hub doesn't mean everything you own becomes shared. Any member — not just whoever set it up — can create an album that's private to them inside the hub. It uses the shared storage like any other album, and nobody else in the hub can see it.
So you don't have to choose between being part of the family archive and having somewhere of your own. Details in Shared and private hub albums.
Add a second admin early#
Whoever creates the hub manages it. Add at least one more admin — your partner is the obvious choice.
It costs nothing and it means the family archive doesn't depend on one person's phone, email address or continued good health. It's the kind of thing that seems unnecessary right up until it isn't.
What to do next#
- Create the hub and invite your household.
- Make an album and put something real in it — a recent weekend, not a project to organise ten years of photos.
- Leave it a week. If people are adding things without being asked, it's working.