“We’re actually quite a close family,” Adrian says. “The problem is not that we don’t talk. We probably have too many chats.”
Adrian is in his forties, married with children, and comes from a large extended family in Singapore. His wife does too.
Chinese New Year is one of the few times when many of the relatives are together. There are aunties and uncles, cousins, children and grandparents, with people arriving and leaving at different times through the day.
And everybody takes photos.
“You’ll have someone taking the big family photo, someone taking pictures of the kids, and another person recording a video somewhere,” Adrian says. “By the end of the day, there are probably hundreds of photos between us.”
Some appear in one WhatsApp group. Others appear in another.
Many never leave the phone of the person who took them.
His wife, Michelle, laughs about how familiar the problem has become.
“Sometimes six months later someone will ask, ‘Who has that photo of Grandma with all the grandchildren?’ We know somebody took it. Then everyone starts searching their phones and old chats.”
There isn't really one family WhatsApp group. Different branches of the family have their own groups, and that makes sense to them.
“We don’t need everybody in one giant chat,” Adrian says. “WhatsApp is good for talking. We use it every day.”
What was missing was somewhere for the occasion itself.
When Adrian started using Clozeu with the family, getting everyone connected took a little patience. Family invitations require the people involved to agree, rather than simply allowing one person to add everybody.
“With a big family, it doesn’t happen overnight,” he says. “But once it’s set up, you don’t have to keep thinking about which chat somebody belongs to.”
For the next gathering, they created a Clozeu Event.
People still took photos in exactly the same way. They still sent messages through WhatsApp. But those who wanted to could also add their pictures and videos to the Event.
“That was the part I liked,” Adrian says. “I started seeing photos from the same day that I had never seen before.”
After the gathering, the family could look through what everyone had contributed and choose the moments they actually wanted to keep in a Collection.
They did not need every photograph.
Just the ones that meant something.
Michelle found herself choosing some of the less obvious pictures.
“The group photos are nice, of course. But sometimes the one I really want is just the children sitting beside their grandmother, or everyone talking after lunch.”
For Adrian, Clozeu has not replaced anything.
The family still talks on WhatsApp. Different relatives still have different chats. People still forget to upload things.
But there is now a place for the parts they decide are worth keeping together.
“I don’t think families need another place to talk,” Adrian says. “We already have that. What I wanted was somewhere the family things don’t just disappear after the conversation moves on.”
And next Chinese New Year, when somebody asks where last year’s family photo went, they may finally know where to look.