Technology today has made it possible for us to easily document our day-to-day lives, either in the form of tiny status updates, high-quality photos or even HD videos. Our smartphones make it incredibly easy to capture some precious moments and cherish them later. But there are some moments that you want to share only with your loved ones in your family. That little family gathering you had last weekend or the photos of your kid’s first birthday — you don’t want to make these public for the world to see and hence usually stay away from places like Facebook or Flickr. Origami is a lovely web service that will help you here.
Origami offers the easiest way for members in a family to share photos, albums, videos or even just text notes with other members of the family. It’s a private home on the web for your family. When you sign up for the free 30-day trial, you are given a subdomain — familyname.origami.com where you can log in and invite other members of the family. This URL is private and accessible only to those who are invited to the family. Here, any member can post their moments and others can comment on those. The site has a very beautiful timeline-based design and everything is neatly laid out. The same beautiful design is seen in the iPhone and Android app. Everything is smooth and feels slick.
Origami also makes it easy to keep up with what’s being shared with a daily family digest (newsletter) that lands in your inbox. It even maintains a nice family Address Book with birthdays, emails and phone numbers that anyone in the family can view. There’s a nifty feature in Origami where you can post a request for a photo/video/story from any member of the family.
Origami is a paid service that costs $5/month per family. That means, even if your family has hundreds of members, you still only pay $5 a month. With this, you get a unlimited storage & bandwidth and can use your own custom domain as well. I’ve been beta testing the iPhone app for months now and it really is a solid product. You can check out the website here and download the iPhone app from the App Store or the Android app from Google Play.