For years, Lifecake was the place for a lot of parents to keep photos of their children: a private timeline for each child, grandparents following along, everything neatly in date order. Then, in early May 2020, came the email nobody expects. Lifecake was closing. Canon, which had bought the app in 2015, pulled the plug. Users had until 30 June to download their photos, so about two months, and after that everything was gone.
If you missed the email, or thought "I'll sort that out next month", your album was lost. No more timeline, no captions, no milestones. Years of carefully kept memories disappeared because a company wanted to make its money somewhere else.
The wrong conclusion: "just go with a big company"
The reflex after an experience like that is understandable: never again a small app, from now on everything goes to Google or Apple. That doesn't solve the real problem. Big companies shut services down too (Google is famous for it), and a photo service from a tech giant isn't a diary. There are no milestones, no little stories with the photos and no private timeline per child. You can read why that matters in our article on why Google Photos falls short as a children's album.
The real lesson from Lifecake is a different one: choose a service you can leave. You may never plan to, but it means you're never stuck. An album of your child needs to last twenty years, longer than the average app exists. The only honest guarantee is that you can take everything with you at any moment.
What to look for in a replacement
- An export button that's already there. Not an email to support, but a button you can press yourself. Try it in your first week: do you get ordinary files back that open without the app?
- Where the quality limit is. Almost every service shrinks photos when you upload them, Ouderliefde included: down to 1920 pixels on the longest side. Find out what that limit is, because an export never gives you back more than what was stored.
- More than just the photos. The captions, dates and milestones are half the value. A good export includes those as well, in a format you can read without the service.
- European privacy rules. A private children's album should fall under the GDPR, and not under the advertising model of an American or Japanese parent company.
How Ouderliefde has solved this
Ouderliefde is a Dutch digital diary for each child, and the Lifecake story is built right into it. In the settings there's an export button that always works, on the free plan too. You get a single zip file with your photos as ordinary JPEGs, in a folder per child, plus a readable text file with all the dates and captions. The export itself says it plainly: you don't need Ouderliefde to do anything with it.
Beyond that it works the way you'd expect from a children's album: a private timeline for each child, a secure viewing link for the grandparents, milestones, and photos you simply send in via WhatsApp.
Bringing your old Lifecake export back to life
Did you download in time back then? Then that export has probably been sitting untouched in a folder for years. You can import it into Ouderliefde: choose the folder or the zip file, and the date the photos were taken is read from the photos themselves to put everything in the right place on the timeline. That emergency download from 2020 becomes a continuous album again.
Want to compare more widely first? Have a look at our articles on Tinybeans alternatives and FamilyAlbum alternatives, where we set the options side by side honestly.
An album you can always take with you
Start a timeline for your child and import your old photos in one go, with an export button that's there from day one.
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