Where photos show up
A picture says a lot. In beanies.family you can attach photos to several things: a milestone (the first-day-of-school shot), a recipe and its cook-log entries (how it turned out), a medication (a photo of the bottle or label), an activity or event in the Family Planner, and a family member’s profile photo (their avatar). Anything with photos shows them in the Family Scrapbook too.
Where your photos are kept
Photos work a little differently from the rest of your family data. Your pod — accounts, to-dos, milestones, all of it — is encrypted. Photos aren’t: each one is saved as an ordinary image file in your own Google Drive, in the same private beanies.family folder your pod lives in, and a link to it is stored inside your encrypted pod. Photos are simply too big to pack into the pod file — so this keeps your pod small and fast, and your pictures sit in your Drive, alongside the rest of your photos and files.
When you add a photo, beanies.family resizes it to a sensible size and saves it as a JPEG before uploading — so it loads quickly, though it won’t be the exact original file. Everyone in your pod can see each other’s photos, because that Drive folder is shared with all your family members.
Because photos live on Google Drive, you need Google Drive turned on to add them. If your pod currently lives in a local file, beanies.family will point you to Settings to connect Google Drive first. See Connecting Google Drive and Moving your pod between local file and Google Drive.
A bit of detail for the curious: each photo’s link is a long, unguessable Google address, and those links live only inside your encrypted pod — which only your family can open. So in everyday terms your photos are visible to your family, just like everything else here. They’re not separately encrypted the way your pod is, though — worth knowing if you’re ever attaching something especially private.
Adding a photo
Open the thing you want a photo on — a milestone, a recipe, a medication, an activity, or a bean’s profile
Tap Add Photos (or Add Photo) where the photos go
Choose Take Photo (on a phone) or From Library — or just drag a photo onto the spot
It uploads and attaches. Repeat to add more (up to the limit below)
- Most forms let you attach a photo straight away. A few want a detail or two first — a recipe needs a name, a medication needs its name, dose, and frequency, a milestone needs you to have picked who it’s for — and will show a small hint if something’s missing
- You can attach up to 4 photos to most items. A few — a profile photo, a medication’s bottle photo — take just one
- HEIC photos (the iPhone default) can’t always be read in the browser. If one won’t go, save or export it as a JPEG first
- If you’re offline when you add a photo, it waits in a queue and uploads automatically once you’re back online
Viewing & removing photos
Tap a photo to open it full-size — you can flip between photos and download one if you want. To take a photo off, use Remove on it (or Replace to swap it for another) — you’ll be asked to confirm first.
Items that have photos show a little badge (e.g. “2 photos attached”), so you can spot them at a glance — handy on the Family Planner and in the Scrapbook.
Related help
- Connecting Google Drive — required before you can add photos
- Moving your pod between local file and Google Drive — switch your pod over
- How Your Data Is Encrypted — what’s inside the encrypted pod (including the links to your photos)