What's your Lovd language?
I'm English, I live in the Netherlands, and most of the people I see on a regular basis grew up somewhere else again. One of my closest friends from university is Norwegian, and her mum's family only speaks Thai. My brother's wife's dad (there isn't really a clean word for that in English; in Spanish it's consuegro, which sort of proves the point) tries his best at English in a cute French accent. My neighbours' kids switch between three languages mid-sentence and don't seem to notice.
That's what a lot of lives look like now, families and friendships alike. The people you most want to share a memory with rarely all read the same language.
Today Lovd. is available in 21 languages:
That's nine new ones on top of the twelve we already had, covering the whole interface, the help docs, the legal pages and the onboarding emails.
Why this matters more for a memory app than for most apps
Most software is used by one person at a time. You pick the language you're most comfortable in and you go.
A shared album doesn't work like that. The whole point is that the grandmother in Bangkok, the cousin in Seoul, the kids growing up in Amsterdam and the friend who took half the photos are all looking at the same collection. If the app only speaks the language of whoever set it up, everyone else is a guest in their own memories. They don't add photos, or write the little notes that make a moment make sense ten years later. They just scroll.
So to me, nine more languages feels like nine fewer walls.
Especially when you're building a family tree
Unlike most photo apps, Lovd lets you tag the people in your photos and record how they're related. From those connections, a family tree builds itself. (I wrote about that properly in our family timeline post.)
That only works if everyone can take part, so we made sure they can. Whether you're on the free plan (room for about 1,000 photos) or a paid one, nobody else in your collection ever has to pay. Storage comes out of your quota, not theirs, and they can add photos, write notes and tag people with no ads and no upsell.
The grandparent who only speaks Thai, the consuegro who only speaks French: they can all be in there, contributing in their own language, without paying or downloading yet another app.
The honest bit: we used AI to translate
I want to be straight about this, because we've been very loud about Lovd's relationship with AI.
We don't train AI on your photos. We don't sell your data to anyone training AI. None of that has changed and none of that ever will. Your memories aren't somebody else's training set.
But for the translations themselves (the buttons, the help articles, the emails), we used AI. A solo founder can't hire human translators for 20 languages, at least not yet. The realistic options were:
- Stay English-only and leave most of the world to Google Translate, which has no context.
- Pick three or four "big" languages and ignore the rest.
- Use AI to get to 21 languages now, and fix the rough edges with help from real humans over time.
I picked the third. It's not perfect. Machine translation gets idioms wrong and loses some of the warmth of the English. In some languages it'll get formality (tu or vous, du or Sie) wrong in ways that feel a bit off. I know that, and I won't pretend otherwise.
What I will promise is that where it's wrong, we'll fix it, and the fix will come from people who speak the language, not from more AI.
This is where you come in
If you use Lovd in a language other than English and something reads weirdly (too formal, too casual, just plain wrong, or it doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the app), please tell us.
The fastest way is the translation feedback channel on our Discord. Drop a screenshot, tell us what it should say, and we'll fix it. No bug template, no jargon. "This sounds like a robot translated it" is perfectly valid feedback, because, well, one did.
If Discord isn't your thing, mike@lovd.app lands in my inbox.
Give Lovd a try
Open your collection, add the people you want there, and let them write in whatever language they like. That's how shared memories are supposed to work.
Mike
