Have you ever wondered what would happen to your photos and videos if Facebook went out of business one day?

A Bath-based firm is helping develop software that could save your family photos and documents forever.

Rocketmakers, a tech company based in Bartlett Street, is helping develop the ‘lifesaving’ app Emortal so our digital memories are never erased.

Today, most of our holiday snaps and family videos are stored digitally, but as technology moves on, the format of the documents stop working – meaning in ten years’ time, we probably won’t be able to open them.

Colin Culross, founder of Emortal, explained: “In simple terms, as technology moves on, our digital memories are effectively rendered obsolete by constant hardware and software upgrades and updates.

Most of our memories are stored digitally on social media
Most of our memories are stored digitally on social media

“Soon people are going to realise all too late that their digital memories will be lost to future generations. And by future generations, I’m talking of no more than a few decades from now.”

Mr Culross came up with the idea when his three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer.

During her five year battle, Mr Culross and his family kept a journal of their life and “realised how important memories are”.

Mr Culross added: “Today, our lives, our memories, our family photographs, videos and stories increasingly exist as bits of digital information. Bits of data stored on our mobile devices, hard drives, social media sites or up in the cloud.

“The problem is: how do we correctly interpret those bits so we can play back our memories in the future, when the device, operating system and software we used to record our original digital memories no longer exists?”

Colin Culross, founder of Emortal
Colin Culross, founder of Emortal

The social media app would work like house insurance, but for your digital documents which can up uploaded to the app.

The team would constantly update the format of the documents, meaning they will never become outdate.

The app, set to be released next year, could even allow users to create ‘time capsule’ for family and loved ones to open in the future.

Richard Godfrey from Rocketmakers added: “When we share our most important memories, how can we make sure they’re going to be there in 20 years’ time?

“It’s an ongoing problem Emortal is trying to solve.

“We’ve being trialling it for some time, and it should be available to download in the New Year.”