Family Memories

Family Memories is a login-gated site at memories.patrickrobel.dk where the family keeps its vacation photos on one continuous timeline. Scrolling down memory lane moves through the years: sticky handwritten year markers, a spine that fills as you scroll, and each trip rendered as a cluster of tilted polaroids with tape and captions. Every tilt and offset is derived deterministically from the photo's id, so the scrapbook look is stable across visits and renders.

Photos flow in from any family member's phone or laptop: the browser uploads straight to a private Cloudflare R2 bucket through presigned URLs, then the server generates WebP thumbnails with sharp, reads the EXIF capture date and GPS position, and reverse geocodes it to a city label. Photos never become public; an authenticated proxy streams them with immutable caching, so the browser cache still works.

There are no passwords anywhere: family members sign in with passkeys, with email magic links as the fallback, and only allowlisted addresses can register. A MapLibre map shows every trip as a mini polaroid pin, and person filters answer questions like 'everywhere Mum went'. The app runs in Docker on my own Hetzner VPS behind Dokploy and Traefik with push-to-main deploys; photos live in R2 and metadata in Neon Postgres, so the server itself stays stateless.