Why we're building Cartoma

Updated 8 September 2026 · 4 min read

My grandmother asks me for photos. Not once, and not politely in passing — she asks every time we speak. More photos of the children, and more often. She wants to know what our week has been like, what they are doing now, the ordinary day-to-day you absorb without having to ask when you live in the same town. She has no way of getting at any of that from France, and she is very clear that she would like to.

She is right to keep asking, because I don't send anywhere near enough. The photos exist — I take them constantly — and most of them never leave my phone. And then, on one call, she went looking for one of the few I had managed to send. She knew it existed and roughly when it had arrived, and she could not find it. So we spent a few minutes of the call watching her hunt for something I had open on my own phone, three hundred miles away.

That is the whole problem in one call, and it has two halves. I don't send photos often enough. And the ones I do send, she can't hold on to. Fixing either one alone wouldn't have helped her much.

Four countries, three languages

My wife and I live in the UK with our two children, who are three and one. My parents and grandparents are in France. My wife's parents are in Spain. Her grandfather is in Venezuela, in his nineties. Between us we speak English, French and Spanish, and no two of us have quite the same combination.

Our kids know all of them by name and recognise their faces. That is genuinely something. But there is a difference between recognising your great-grandfather and knowing him, and right now the distance is deciding which one they get.

The photos never leave my phone

This is the part I find hardest to admit, because there is nobody else to blame for it. The photos exist. I take them constantly. They sit on my phone and they stay there.

It isn't that sending them is difficult. It takes ten seconds. It's that ten seconds has to be remembered, by me, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nothing about that Tuesday is prompting me to do it. Some months I manage it once. Some months I don't manage it at all.

The photos that do get sent get lost

The few that make it out land in WhatsApp, which is where they slowly fade away. My grandmother sees the photo once, on the day it arrives. After that it is buried under everything else that has come through since, and finding it again means knowing how to scroll back through a conversation, which is a skill, and one nobody ever taught her.

So the photo is delivered and then it is gone. She got a moment out of it. She didn't get to keep anything.

Those are two separate failures, and we wanted to fix both: build a habit of sharing at our end, and make what arrives at the other end permanent.

Why paper?

Paper is a strange answer in 2026, and it took us a while to come round to it. But our grandparents aren't tech savvy, and every digital answer we looked at ended up asking them to operate something. An account, a password, an app to update, a screen to navigate. Every one of those is a place where the people we most wanted to include drop out.

A booklet has no login and no battery. It works exactly the same way for the least confident person in our family as for the most. And it stays put. It sits on a table and it is still there in June. It gets put on the door of the fridge and creates a smile every time someone gets the milk.

My grandmother already receives a booklet of family photos, and it is the closest thing to proof we have. Every four weeks, the day it lands, the family chat lights up with comments about it. She keeps it out and shows it to her neighbours, to her cleaners, to whoever comes through the house. Nothing we ever sent to her phone got shown to another human being.

Why every four weeks?

The obvious alternative is that you can already print a photo book once a year. You can, and it makes a lovely memento, but it doesn't keep anyone connected.

Small children move fast. If our son starts walking in February, an annual album means his great-grandparents watch it happen at Christmas, ten months after the fact and long after it stopped being news. And compiling a whole year of photos is a big enough job that it mostly doesn't get done at all. We know, because we thought about it, and it didn't happen.

Four weeks is short enough that the photos are still current, and small enough that adding to it during the month costs nothing. That's the real design goal: the habit of sending photos regularly, not just the artefact.

Where we are now?

My wife and I are building this for our own family first, which is the only reason we trust any of it. Our parents and grandparents are the test subjects. When something doesn't work for them, we hear about it immediately.

If your family looks anything like ours — a few countries, a few languages, a group chat half of you have muted — we'd like you on the waiting list. And if you tell us what you've already tried and how it fell apart, that's more useful to us than anything else you could send.