My Dad was 92 when he passed away in September 2016, after several difficult months in hospital and six weeks after leaving me a “Happy birthday, I love you, Vic” message on a social media app.

How to bring a physical album into Ponga and use it to crowdsource stories from friends and family. — Photographs tossed in a box. Pretty much where many of us family storytellers begin. Cleaning out a relative’s closet, discover a treasure chest of old family photographs, then what? (Unfortunately for me, I threw so many old photographs out that I still lose sleep about it… oh the stories lost!)

The perfect backdrop for your pictures and stories. Set the stage. — For a few years when I was a young girl, my mother was a Sunday School teacher. She loved it and had a unique platform for explaining different cultures around the world. The Storyboard. Basically, it started with a 3 x 3-foot board covered with felt. Then she had spent…

So, out there in this big world, who are we related to? Pretty much everyone. Could be someone we pass on the street, sit next to in a restaurant… anyone… anywhere. We’re all connected somehow. Anyone famous? Years ago, I met a young woman from the UK who’s second or…

Which comes first, the photo or the memory? It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg thing. In my case, it was a strong memory of one particular photograph that came first. In my usual storytelling, story sharing way, while preparing a storyboard, a series of photographs arranged digitally…

An old, yellowed, typewritten letter resurfaces and creates a context to wrap around family photographs — I’m always surprised, pleasantly of course, by who responds to my invitations to my Ponga digital family albums. …

If you’ve ever heard that distinctive sound of slides advancing in a Carousel slide projector, read on… — Are you old enough to remember being subjected to the “slideshow”? Maybe subjected is a tad too harsh… let's go with “presented.” Old Uncle Derrick’s road trip from Montreal to Disney World in Florida… all nicely and chronologically organised on the slide carousel of the projector. If you were born…

Connecting the dots and joining generations with Ponga. — There’s something in a photograph that inspires us to search for stories and context. Sometimes it’s not about what’s in the picture, and instead, about the clues it reveals. Those unseen stories are gold. I’ve learned to crowdsource the hunt for these stories. Using Ponga pictures, I can invite everyone…

Beam me up Scottie — Is the joy in the making or in the doing? For me, both is the short answer. My son Stephen lives in Quebec, 15,472 kilometers away from where I live in Queensland. The only place in Canada farther away is Sydney, Nova Scotia. Twenty plus hours flying time, back when…