About KeepFrame

How KeepFrame Started | Our Story

Written by founder Stan, September 2, 2026 — one week before we went live to the world.

Kenny is my brother. Kyle was our neighbor growing up. Our mom was turning 70 and had been trying for a few years already to get 43 VHS tapes from when we were kids digitized. Two things kept stopping her: she'd have to ship the tapes to someone she didn't know, and these were literally irreplaceable — not something she was willing to risk in the mail. And every place she found to do it charged way more than she wanted to pay, even setting the shipping risk aside.

The problem we had was that her 70th had already passed and we'd forgotten a present.

A few days before the big day, we reached out to Kyle to see if he knew how to do this, since he'd always been great with computers. He hadn't, but he said how hard could it be.

That evolved through two broken old VCRs lying around, down to capturing all 43 tapes on a third one that turned out to actually be our parents' VCR — we kept it, and gave Mom free digitization to make up for it. We used a very user-friendly capture program called Elgato to actually do it.

Mom was thrilled with her present. It was only about two months past her birthday that she actually got the finished copy.

I'm genuinely against any footage of myself or my family landing on someone else's computer — but the obvious shortcut would've been handing it to some AI tool in the cloud. So instead I went down the deepest rabbit hole of the whole project: figuring out how to have an AI on my own computer, alone, get me started turning Mom's tapes into something actually usable. I'll skip the boring part and go straight to the end — it's completely possible. We couldn't find another service offering the exact combination we wanted: local handling, private analysis, and a genuinely searchable family archive.

That gap — this should exist and it doesn't — is when we decided to start the business, build this site, and try to share the idea with everyone. 80 hours of digitized family footage is already amazing. But 80 hours where you can jump straight to a chapter or a keyword — Christmas, a first word, a first bike ride — is something else entirely.

Mom's tapes were eventually redone with our actual finished product, chaptering and highlight reels included, and it made a real difference — especially at big family gatherings. When we bring aunts and uncles over, we can jump straight to where they show up in the tapes so they actually get to enjoy them too. Hosting everything online so it's reachable from anywhere was the natural next step from there.

Along the way we met a lot of good people who helped us get our hands on the apex of VCR restoration hardware: a JVC HR-S9600U. Oddly enough, this 20-plus-year-old deck is still the best we've found — one more reason to do this now, before machines like it disappear entirely. We also upgraded from Elgato to a Magewell capture setup, which gets a lot more out of every tape, and Kenny worked through the entire AI restoration pathway running on a local computer alone. Turns out that's a lot trickier than doing it in the cloud — it took Kenny and me quite a bit longer to figure out than we expected.

At this point, we're just hoping to share what we gave our own mom — hopefully delivered on someone's actual birthday, and not a couple months late.

So drop us an email and let us help you celebrate someone with a truly unique take down memory lane.

— Stan