For over a hundred years, my family has been taking photographs — and for most of my life, I've been the one holding onto them. As a lifelong photographer and lover of history, I've spent years collecting, scanning, and identifying thousands of family photos, a project that's taken hundreds of hours and just as many dollars. My dream is to build a lasting digital archive where these memories are preserved, organized, and shared with the people who love them — and with anyone else who values preserving their own history.

I've been struggling with health issues most of my life, and I have no children of my own. My life, honestly, comes down to three things: work, managing my health, and this project. I do not have a community or circle of friends — none. Which means when something like this comes up, there's no one else to ask. This project has become more than a passion — it's something I want to be remembered by after I shuffle off this mortal coil.

**Here's where I'm stuck.**

In late 2025, I built and started hosting the site on a ten-year-old iMac I picked up from someone on Facebook Marketplace for $50. It's held together admirably, but it's woefully underpowered — it can't come close to hosting even a fraction of the full photo library. Worse, its hard drive is slowly failing, and the 12-year-old NAS storing the actual photo archive ran out of space a few nights ago (and was painfully slow well before that).

As a software engineer, I can build and host the finished site myself — which alone saves thousands of dollars I'd otherwise have to pay someone else to build and host it. I just need reliable, modern hardware to do it on. My goal is **$2,539**, which covers:

- **Headless Mini-PC** — $700

- **4 × 8TB hard drives** — $1,200 ($300 each)

- **4-bay desktop NAS** — $639

For a site of this size, that's honestly a modest ask — this is lean, no-frills infrastructure built to last, not a splurge.

Every contribution, big or small, gets me closer to a permanent home for these photos. $20 helps buy a hard drive. $50 is a full day of archiving work. Whatever you can give helps make sure these faces, names, and stories aren't lost.

Thank you — truly — for helping me build something meant to outlast me.