001
Empty the box
Find the photographs worth keeping and upload them directly from a phone or computer.
Ktabi
Turning forgotten family photos into books that outlive us.
KtabiProduct film
00:00 / 00:00
Our parents’ memories are in albums and boxes. Ours are disappearing inside phones.
Ktabi creates a bridge between both generations. Families upload old photographs, restore damaged and faded images using AI, organize them into a story, personalize a physical book, and receive the finished archive at home.
- AI
- Photo Restoration
- Digital Archive
- Book Builder
- E-commerce
- UX/UI Design
- Full-Stack Development
- Brand Strategy
Product
Ktabi — L’atelier d’archives familiales.
My role
Founder, Product Designer & Full-Stack Developer. End-to-end ownership across concept, brand, product, UX/UI, AI, engineering, print workflow, and physical experience.
Platform
A web experience for restoring, organizing, and transforming family photographs into physical archival books.
Tools
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- AI Images
- Cloud
- Figma
001 · Overview
The photos already existed. The memories were disappearing.
Almost every family has the same box: weddings, childhoods, holidays, grandparents, homes that no longer exist, and people we don’t photograph anymore.
The photographs survived, but the stories around them were slowly disappearing. Ktabi gives those photographs a second life through one guided journey: find, upload, restore, tell the story, create the book, and receive it at home.
002 · Business context
Family history is incredibly valuable—and surprisingly fragile.
Restoration traditionally requires technical knowledge or professional help. Book creation requires another tool. Printing requires another service. The process is fragmented enough that most people simply postpone it.
Ktabi turns preservation into a complete product. The restored image isn’t the destination. The family archive is.
003 · The insight
People don’t care about restoring pixels. They care about the person in the photograph.
Nobody looks at a photograph of their grandmother and thinks about image processing. They think: That’s her. I had never seen this photo. Look how young they were.
Ktabi is not positioned as an AI tool. AI is simply the mechanism that makes preservation accessible. The product is about memory.
004 · Product vision
From a box of photographs to a family book.
002
Restore
Repair age-related damage while preserving the identity and character of the original image.
003
Tell the story
Preserve names, places, dates, relationships, and the details somebody else may forget.
004
Print it
Turn restored photographs and stories into a personalized hardcover family book.
005 · Key decisions
Repair the photograph. Don’t reinvent the memory.
001
Make AI invisible
No prompts, technical controls, or terminology. Upload, restore, compare, and keep.
002
Restore without rewriting history
Faces, expressions, clothing, composition, surroundings, and identity matter more than artificial perfection.
003
Make restoration immediate
The before-and-after transformation creates the emotional moment at the center of the product.
004
Don’t stop at restored photos
A physical book gives the archive a destination families can open, gift, and pass on.
005
Keep the process accessible
Every stage answers one question: what should I do next?
006
Show value before purchase
People experience the restoration on their own photograph before committing to the physical product.
006 · The restoration experience
The most important interaction happens in seconds.
A user uploads a photograph that may be decades old. The original remains visible, Ktabi processes it, and the restored version appears for immediate comparison.
The interaction communicates something carefully: the original photograph hasn’t been replaced. It has been preserved.
007 · Building the archive
A photograph becomes more valuable when you know its story.
Names, places, dates, relationships, and small stories are part of the archive. A file called IMG_0048.jpg becomes: Casablanca, 1978. My parents shortly after they met.
That transformation is just as important as restoring the pixels.
008 · The physical product
The final interface has no screen.
After restoring and organizing photographs, customers transform the archive into a personalized hardcover book. The cover uses their imagery and title; inside, photographs live beside the stories that explain them.
The digital product handles the difficult work. The final experience is tactile—and can be passed to another generation.
009 · Designing for emotion
This wasn’t a productivity tool.
Ktabi needed to optimize for meaning. Uploading should be effortless and restoration immediate, but discovering an old photograph should never feel transactional.
Warm. Quiet. Personal. Physical. It should feel like opening a family drawer, not software storing files.
010 · What was delivered
A complete journey from physical photograph to physical archive.
001
Photo Upload
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
002
AI Restoration
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
003
Before / After Experience
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
004
Family Archive
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
005
Book Creation
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
006
Cover Personalization
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
007
Physical Printing
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
008
Delivery
Designed as one connected part of the end-to-end Ktabi experience.
011 · The complete journey
From forgotten to preserved.
Open the box. Choose the photographs. Upload them. Restore them. Ask your parents about the people you don’t recognize. Write down the stories. Organize the memories. Create the book. Print it. Give it back to the family.
The box becomes a story.
012 · Product philosophy
AI should help us remember, not generate another thing to forget.
Ktabi uses some of the newest image technology to solve a very old human problem: memory disappears. Technology makes the process possible, but technology isn’t what the customer keeps. They keep the memory.
We don’t restore photos. We preserve the people inside them.