Vault

Everyone has the same problem: years of photos and videos scattered across a phone, an old phone, a tablet and a laptop, and a nagging sense that the only copy of some of them is on a device that could fall in a pool. Vault is a private home for all of it. Uploads from any device go straight into cloud storage that belongs to the owner, not to a platform, and the whole library is there in one place.

The design problem was scale. A library like this runs to tens of thousands of items, and the thing that makes photo apps feel slow is waiting for a grid to load. Vault organises everything by month and year, shows the count for each, and lets a viewer jump to any point in the timeline with one gesture. Years, months or everything at once, switched from a control that stays in reach. There is nothing to wait for in between; the grid is ready when the viewer gets there.

Videos sit in the same grid as photos, each marked with its length, and play in place. Uploading is a single action from the top bar, and selecting items for a download or a delete is one tap away. The interface is a header, a grid and a timeline, and it stays that simple no matter how large the library grows.

Under the hood it is a web application backed by object storage, so it works the same from a phone browser, a tablet or a laptop, with no app to install and no subscription tier deciding how much can be kept. The library is exactly as big as the storage the owner chooses to give it.

Vault is unforgiving about speed by design, and it is a good example of what we mean by a web application: a real interface over real data, engineered to stay fast as the data grows.