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.

This is just what most people's lives actually look like now — families, friendships, the lot. The people you most want to share a memory with are rarely all reading the same language.

Today lovd. is available in 21 languages:

Twenty-one languages, with more on the way as the community asks for them.

That's nine new ones on top of the twelve we already supported. The whole interface, the help docs, the legal pages, the onboarding emails. All of it.

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 from now. They just lurk and scroll.

Which is why nine more languages feels, to me, more like nine fewer walls.

Especially when you're building a family tree

One of the things lovd does that most photo apps don't is let you tag the people in your photos and record how they're related to each other. From those connections, a family tree quietly builds itself. (I wrote about that properly in our family timeline post.)

That only really 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 anything. Storage always comes out of your quota, not theirs. They can add photos, write notes and tag people with no ads, no upsell, and no "create an account to view this photo" wall in sight.

Turn people on and birthdays and relationships sit alongside your photos and events. Click a person to see their profile.

The grandparent who only speaks Thai. The consuegro who only speaks French. The university friend's mate from back home who tried his best. The whole point is that they can all be in there, contributing in their own language, without anyone having to pay or download yet another thing.

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 email copy), we used AI. A solo founder in Amsterdam can't credibly hire human translators across 20 languages, not yet at least. The realistic options were:

Stay English-only and tell most of the world to rely on Google Translate which lacks 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 one. It's not perfect. Machine translation gets idioms wrong. It misses the warmth that the English copy was written with. In some languages it'll get formality (the tu vs vous, the du vs Sie) wrong in ways that feel a bit off. I know that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What I'll promise is this: where it's wrong, we want to fix it. And the fix is going to come from people who actually 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 our Discord. There's a channel for translation feedback. Drop a screenshot, tell us what it should say, and we'll fix it. No bug report template, no jargon. "This sentence sounds like a robot translated it" is a perfectly valid piece of feedback, because, well, one did.

If Discord isn't your thing, mike@lovd.app lands in my inbox.

Give lovd a try

Open up your collection. Add the people you actually want there. Let them write notes in the language they want. That's how shared memories are supposed to work.

Mike