I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it took me about 9 months to print out pictures of my third baby and put them up around the house. When I think back to how diligent I was with baby #1 and (a little less diligent with) baby #2, I have vowed to be more proactive with the thousands of photos I have of her on my phone. Thankfully, there’s a neat new app called Lifecake (for iOS and Android) to help which ranks up there with DayOne and BabyBook as a terrific app for new parents to help log memories that might otherwise be forgotten.
I’d call it a photo app meets digital journal meets timeline of your baby’s life.
Of course other apps do a lot of these things, but where Lifecake really stands out to me is with its built-in timeline based on your baby’s birth date. This way you can see what your baby was doing at 3 days, 12 weeks, or 9 months and 16 days; perfect for for remembering those thing you can never remember in those early mom brain days.
Trust me, whenever I rely solely on my own memory, I tend to be a couple of months off.
It’s not all an auto-pilot though. You can add comments to any photo – Spitting up on my shirt for the third time in a day! – then share the photos with all 700 of your closest friends who are surely waiting with bated breath for each and every one. For those extra-interested grandparents and siblings, you can even share the entire timeline. They just log onto the Lifecake website to check it out themselves, instead of you spending time attaching photos to texts and emails. And the invite-only sharing adds a level of confidence.
A nice bonus with Lifecake is something our readers often ask about: You can also order a bound hardcover book of your photo timeline right from the website. (And through the app, hopefully in a future update). It ‘s no Artifact Uprising to be sure; I’d like it if they offered more customization and layout options. But the fact that it auto-populates the book for you is awfully handy.
Based on my track record for getting baby pictures printed, as much automation as possible is definitely a good thing.
Lifecake is available for free on iTunes and Google Play. The hardcover book pricing is $50 for 80 pages.
