Step-by-step guides for preserving your family's stories
How-To Guides
You have thousands of photos and almost none of the story behind them. Here's a simple, all-ages system for capturing your kids' childhood memories — the everyday ones you'll actually want back — in under a minute at a time, and keeping them somewhere they won't get lost.
Patrick Moore • July 10, 2026
How-To Guides
Meta's new AI can remix your public Instagram photos without your explicit consent. This guide explains why this matters for your family's memories and walks you through the steps to opt out and protect your pictures from being used in AI image generation.
Patrick Moore • July 9, 2026
How-To Guides
That box of old film reels in the attic is a treasure chest of silent stories. This guide walks you through preserving them, covering everything from Super 8 to 16mm film. Learn the pros and cons of DIY methods versus professional services to safely digitize your family's irreplaceable home movies.
Patrick Moore • July 8, 2026
How-To Guides
That dusty box of cassettes holds more than magnetic tape; it holds voices, stories, and laughter you can't get back. This guide offers practical steps to digitize old audio cassettes, converting precious recordings into a lasting digital format you can share and cherish for generations.
Patrick Moore • July 4, 2026
How-To Guides
That ever-growing pile of your child's art is a treasure trove of memories, but it's also overwhelming. How do you decide what to keep and how to save it forever? This guide offers a practical, heartfelt approach to digitally preserving your child's artwork, ensuring these precious creations become a lasting part of your family's story.
Patrick Moore • July 4, 2026
How-To Guides
The first year is a blur of sleepless nights and breathtaking firsts. You want to remember every smile and coo, but creating a detailed baby book feels impossible. This guide offers simple, low-effort habits to help you capture precious moments without adding to your overwhelm.
Patrick Moore • July 1, 2026
How-To Guides
Old handwritten letters are the most fragile — and most story-rich — thing in the box. Here's how to digitize them safely (phone, flatbed, or mail-in), and how to archive them so the meaning survives, not just the image.
Patrick Moore • July 1, 2026
How-To Guides
A grandmother's recipe card isn't just instructions — it's her handwriting, her margin notes, the splatter on the corner. Here's how to preserve handwritten recipes and the stories behind them before the cards fade for good.
Patrick Moore • July 1, 2026
How-To Guides
Video captures what audio can't — the hands, the smile, the way they look off camera remembering. Here's how to record video interviews with relatives simply and well, and keep the footage where it won't be lost.
Patrick Moore • July 1, 2026
How-To Guides
Before you scan that box of family photos, a little physical care can make a world of difference. This guide walks you through simple, archival-safe DIY photo repair for common issues like tears, creases, and surface grime, ensuring you get the best possible digital copy for preservation.
Patrick Moore • June 30, 2026
How-To Guides
That little phone in your pocket holds a universe of firsts: first smile, first grasp, first messy spoonful of peas. For grandparents living miles away, seeing these moments is everything. This guide offers practical, private ways to bridge the distance and ensure they feel deeply connected to your baby's journey.
Patrick Moore • June 29, 2026
How-To Guides
Tired of the same old interview questions? This guide offers creative, gentle ways to help seniors share their stories using sensory prompts, music, photos, and shared activities—perfect for those who are reluctant or facing memory challenges.
The Memory Murals Team • June 28, 2026
How-To Guides
You've found a box of your great-grandparents' photos, but some aren't paper. They're heavy, metallic, and strangely captivating. These tintypes and daguerreotypes are family treasures, but they're also fragile artifacts that require special care. This guide explains how to handle and store them.
Patrick Moore • June 27, 2026
How-To Guides
Your phone is full of photos, but what about the memories a camera can't capture? This guide explores creative, simple ways to preserve the fleeting sensory details of your baby's first year—the smells, textures, and feelings you'll want to remember forever.
Patrick Moore • June 26, 2026
How-To Guides
The first year flies by in a blur of sleepless nights and incredible firsts. This guide helps you move beyond just snapping photos, showing you how to intentionally create a digital 'first year' memory capsule—a collection of stories, sounds, and moments your child can explore for years to come.
Patrick Moore • June 24, 2026
How-To Guides
Bring your old photo albums to life by adding QR codes that link to digital stories. This guide shows you how to connect a printed photo with a voice recording or video, creating a bridge between your physical heirlooms and your private digital archive. It's a simple way to hear the story behind the smile, right from the album page.
Patrick Moore • June 22, 2026
How-To Guides
Tired of getting one-word answers when you try to connect your kids with their grandparents' stories? I was too. Forget formal interviews. Here are some fun, game-like activities that turn memory-keeping into an adventure kids will ask to go on again.
Patrick Moore • June 21, 2026
How-To Guides
We obsess over photographing every baby milestone, but the most evocative memories are often sounds: the gurgles, babbles, and that first garbled 'dada.' This guide offers practical ways to capture and preserve the fleeting audio of your baby's first year, ensuring their tiny voice is never forgotten.
Patrick Moore • June 20, 2026
How-To Guides
Found a box of your family's old slides or negatives? This guide walks you through the best ways to digitize them at home, from using your smartphone to dedicated scanners. We'll help you turn those tiny, forgotten frames into vibrant digital memories you can finally share and preserve.
Patrick Moore • June 18, 2026
How-To Guides
Many seniors want to share their stories but don't know where to start. This guide offers practical, gentle ways for them to take the lead in recording their own life story, from simple audio apps to creative writing prompts, ensuring their unique voice is preserved for generations.
Patrick Moore • June 16, 2026
How-To Guides
The first few months with a new baby are a blur of joy, exhaustion, and a thousand photos a day. If your iPhone's camera roll has become a chaotic sea of nearly identical sleepy smiles, you're not alone. This guide offers a simple, sustainable system to bring order to the adorable chaos.
Patrick Moore • June 15, 2026
How-To Guides
Most family photos today live somewhere a stranger's algorithm can scan them or a forgotten password can lock them away forever. Here's how to build a private archive only the people you choose can see — and that doesn't belong to anyone but you.
Patrick Moore • May 27, 2026
How-To Guides
A four-step walkthrough for restoring old family photos with AI in 2026 — including the free path (Remini, Hotpot, Magic Memory) and the preservation-grade paid path (Memory Murals). The shortest possible workflow from shoebox to restored archive.
Patrick Moore • May 20, 2026
How-To Guides
The exact steps to cancel FamilyAlbum Premium on iPhone, Android, and the web — plus what happens to your photos after you cancel, whether you keep access on the free tier, and where families usually move next.
Patrick Moore • May 19, 2026
How-To Guides
Android voicemail saving is carrier-specific in a way iPhone is not — Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile each use their own app with their own export flow. Here's the current 2026 procedure for each, plus what to do when the stock voicemail app isn't installed on a newer unlocked Android phone.
The Memory Murals Team • May 16, 2026
How-To Guides
The version of your kid who lives in your house ends in August. Not in a dramatic way — they'll come home for breaks, sit at the same table, sleep in the same bed. But the day-to-day person, the one who walks through the kitchen at midnight saying nothing, is closing up shop. Here's how to record them before they go.
Patrick Moore • May 16, 2026
How-To Guides
Most Father's Day posts ask you to record your dad. This one asks something different: spend Sunday asking him about his father. He is, for most of us, the last living person who really knew the man your kids will only ever see in a frame. When he goes, the only stories left of your grandfather go with him.
Patrick Moore • May 15, 2026
How-To Guides
If your family had to recover your photos, voicemails, and stories on a Wednesday afternoon with no warning, how much would they actually find? Most families don't know. Here's the 5-step audit to find out before it matters.
Patrick Moore • May 15, 2026
How-To Guides
iPhone voicemails live on your carrier's server, not your phone — which means they can disappear without warning. Here's exactly how to back them up to your Mac or PC in under ten minutes, with the iOS 18 share workflow, the iCloud caveats, and the third-party tools that actually work in 2026.
The Memory Murals Team • May 15, 2026
How-To Guides
A diagnosis doesn't take everything at once. Here's a 2026 practical guide to recording your parent's stories at every stage — what to capture first, how to interview without pressure, and where these recordings should live.
The Memory Murals Team • May 14, 2026
How-To Guides
Most of us mean to ask. We don't. Then we lose the chance. Here's an honest, parent-neutral guide to interviewing your mom or dad — what actually works, what doesn't, and where the recording lives for the next twenty years.
Patrick Moore • May 13, 2026
How-To Guides
Four common plans for collecting wedding photos from guests all fail in the same way. Here's an honest 2026 guide — which day-of apps work, and where your photos should live for the next 20 years.
Patrick Moore • May 12, 2026
How-To Guides
The exact steps to invite grandparents to FamilyAlbum on iPhone and Android — plus the three alternatives that actually work for grandparents who refuse to install yet another app.
Patrick Moore • May 11, 2026
How-To Guides
Most digital legacies don't survive their owners — accounts go dark, subscriptions lapse, files vanish during account migrations nobody noticed. Here's how to build an archive that actually lasts past you.
Patrick Moore • May 10, 2026
How-To Guides
Want relatives to read your family's archive without giving them permission to edit or delete what you've gathered? Here's how view-only access actually works — what relatives can and can't do, and how to set it up in under five minutes.
Patrick Moore • May 10, 2026
How-To Guides
Most Mother's Day posts ask you to record your mom. This one asks something different: spend Sunday asking her about her mother. She is, for most of us, the last living person who really knew her. When she goes, the only stories left of your grandmother go with her.
Patrick Moore • May 8, 2026
How-To Guides
It's three days before Father's Day, the shipping cutoffs are gone, and the steak dinner is a cliché. Skip the gift card. The one thing you can give him this weekend — that he'll still have when he can't tell stories anymore — takes 30 minutes, costs nothing, and arrives faster than any package.
Patrick Moore • May 7, 2026
How-To Guides
Most dads don't open up across a kitchen table. They talk sideways — in the truck, in the garage, walking the dog. Here's how to record him anyway: why he deflects, why audio is the medium that finally works, and 30 questions ranked from 'first car' to 'your father.'
Patrick Moore • May 5, 2026
How-To Guides
There are voicemails on your phone right now that you'd cross a city to recover if you lost them — your kid's voice from a phase that's already over, a partner singing into the answering machine, a grandparent's holiday call. Here's how to save them in five minutes, before your phone, your carrier, or your number takes them away.
The Memory Murals Team • May 3, 2026
How-To Guides
Your VHS tapes are on a clock. Magnetic tape decays, VCRs are nearly extinct in 2026, and the home movies inside those plastic shells are quietly running out of time. Here's the honest guide to digitizing them — and what to do once you have a hard drive full of unlabeled MP4s.
Patrick Moore • May 3, 2026
How-To Guides
Most moms deflect when you ask them to 'tell their story.' Here's how to set up the kitchen-table interview, the script that breaks the deflection, the five pivots when she says 'oh, nobody wants to hear about that,' and the three questions to ask if you only get twenty minutes.
Patrick Moore • April 30, 2026
How-To Guides
A practical, no-fluff guide to turning a shoebox of old family photos into a digital archive — using just your phone, a flatbed scanner, or a mail-in service. Real tradeoffs, no jargon.
Patrick Moore • April 28, 2026
How-To Guides
A practical, emotionally honest guide for going through your parents' photo collection — whether you're cleaning out a house after a death, helping a parent downsize, or staring at the boxes for the third weekend in a row. What to keep, what to let go, what to scan first, and how to forgive yourself for the parts that hurt.
The Memory Murals Team • April 28, 2026
How-To Guides
Seven specific, lasting ways to memorialize a parent — from saving their voicemails before the carrier deletes them to planting something that outlives the grief. Pick one. Start this week.
The Memory Murals Team • April 26, 2026
How-To Guides
After a dementia diagnosis, voice fades in a specific order — vocabulary, then patterns, then the laugh. Here's a 7-step plan to record your parent before that order runs out.
The Memory Murals Team • April 23, 2026
How-To Guides
There's a shoebox on a closet shelf with hundreds of photos of people nobody alive can fully name. Your mom knows who most of them are. She won't, forever. Here's how to fix it this month — before the only memory that still knows goes quiet.
Patrick Moore • April 22, 2026
How-To Guides
Your phone carrier is counting down to the day your loved one's last voicemail disappears forever. Most families don't know this until it's too late. Here's exactly how to save it — on iPhone and Android — before the clock runs out.
The Memory Murals Team • April 19, 2026
How-To Guides
Every article gives you a list of questions to ask your grandparents. Almost none of them tell you what to do next. Here's the part nobody writes: how to actually capture the answers so they outlive the conversation.
Patrick Moore • April 11, 2026
How-To Guides
Flowers wilt by Tuesday. Brunch is forgotten by the next weekend. But a 30-minute recording of your mom's voice, saved every Mother's Day for the rest of her life, becomes the only family heirloom that gets more valuable with time.
Patrick Moore • April 2, 2026
How-To Guides
Step-by-step guide to creating shared albums on iPhone. Plus, why shared albums fall short for preserving family memories long-term — and what to use instead.
Patrick Moore • March 29, 2026
How-To Guides
Learn how to create a photo book online step-by-step. Discover design tips, printing options, and why families are choosing Memory Murals instead.
Patrick Moore • March 9, 2026
How-To Guides
To unlock a family member's history, stop acting like a biographer and start acting like a key-holder. Here's how to move past one-word answers.
Patrick Moore • January 28, 2026
