Some pictures deserve better than an endless grid.

My camera roll is full of photos I love and screenshots I can't bring myself to delete: the first "I love you" message, a note from Mom, a funny conversation I wanted to remember. Photo apps treat all of it as a grid to scroll past. I wanted something I could actually sit with.

So I built Memento, a Windows app that turns a folder of photos or screenshots into a book you page through like a real one.

What it does

  • Make a book in a minute. Drag in a folder. Memento reads each file's date and lays the pictures out by day, with a title page before each new one.
  • Turn real pages. Big Previous and Next buttons, the arrow keys, or a click on either half of the page. A slider with day markers jumps anywhere, and a slideshow mode flips the pages for you.
  • Tell it in your own order. Drag pictures into the sequence that tells your story. Switch back to by-date at any moment and your custom order is kept.
  • Look closer. A round magnifying lens, up to 8×, for small writing in a screenshot or a faraway face.
  • Write in the margins. Add a note to any picture, and fix the date on a scanned old photo.
  • Send it or print it. Export a print-ready PDF with a cover, dates, your notes and optional page numbers.
  • Pass the book on. Save it as a Memento book: one file with every picture, date, note and your order. Open it on another computer and it becomes their own copy to read, add to and change.

It works with JPG, PNG and WebP, works offline, and comes in English and French.

Privacy by design

There's no account, sign-in, cloud or tracking. Your pictures are copied into Memento's own folder on your computer and stay there. Your original files are never changed. Nothing is uploaded, ever.

For a tool that holds people's most personal screenshots, I decided the safest server was no server at all.

Designing for low vision from the first page

This was the part that changed how I build. Memento was designed for people who find most photo apps too small, too faint or too fiddly.

That meant treating accessibility as the main design constraint, not a checklist at the end:

  • Large, labelled controls, always in the same place.
  • High-contrast themes: yellow on black or white on black. The app also follows Windows' own contrast mode automatically.
  • Interface scaling up to 200%, where every button and every word scales together.
  • A magnifier from 2× to 8×, with four lens sizes that remember your favourite.
  • Boost contrast and invert, which strengthens faint text and turns bright white chat screenshots dark.
  • Full keyboard and screen-reader support, with clear labels throughout.
  • Reduced motion respected. Nothing moves unless you ask it to.

You can try some of this on the website: there's a high-contrast toggle and a text-size button in the header, and the page itself follows the same rules.

A few lessons I took from this:

  1. "Big buttons" isn't the same as accessible. Labels, position consistency and keyboard order mattered as much as size.
  2. Respect the OS first. Following Windows' contrast mode meant users didn't have to configure anything.
  3. Scaling the whole interface together (not just fonts) avoids layouts that break at 200%.
  4. Motion is opt-in. Page turns are the app's signature, so being able to turn animation off without losing function was the hard part.

Try it

Memento is on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11. There's a free 7-day trial with no payment needed, then a one-time purchase to keep it. Updates arrive through the Store.

I'd love feedback, especially from anyone who works on accessibility or who tries it with a parent or grandparent. What's confusing, and what's missing?