How do accounts work?

Good question. Before signing up for any service, it's important to understand how accounts work. At Ponga, we wanted to build a system that's simple and makes sense for you individually and as a family.

Members & Guests

When you join Ponga as a member, you can upload hundreds, or even thousands of pictures and privately share them with anyone — individually or in albums. While you can upload as many pictures as you like to Ponga, we have a budget that allows up to 1,000 images per month on our monthly plan, or up to 12,000 added at any time during the year on our annual plans. An upload meter adds a penny an image for uploads above that. Learn more about our metered billing here.

Since Ponga's six levels of zoom take full advantage of high-resolution images, Ponga doesn't limit you to the size of image files you can upload. This is tremendously helpful to people engaged in scanning projects because it means that you don't have to downsize the images to fit into some account ceiling. If you upload multiple copies of the same image, however, we will count these as separate files.

The people you share pictures with are your free guests. Anyone you share pictures with can add comments, and recordings and generally contribute as much as they like — without paying us separately. To ensure your privacy, anyone you invite to your pictures must create an authenticated account to view your pictures — but their accounts are free. They're your guests.

Your paid membership allows you to

• Add high-resolution pictures to your account. (Why fool with downsizing or transferring large image files. We'll take care of tiling images and they're shared as a link so they can be viewed efficiently across any kind of network).
• Automatically sort the pictures by the people in your images so that you can put names to faces. Reach out to the family for the ones you don't yet recognize.
• Add as much content as you'd like to each picture with written, recorded comments, attached images, and linked or embedded documents and media.
• Share those pictures with family and friends who can also contribute as much content as they'd like to reach a picture.
• Add pictures to albums to selectively share them with family and friends

Guests

Family and friends invited to contribute to pictures, become guest contributors or viewers. With a guest account, they can add

• Add as much content as they'd like to each picture with written, recorded comments, attached images, and linked or embedded documents and media.
• Delete any comment they've made, but they cannot delete any comment made by anyone else or change the title and description of a picture.

Members own their own pictures

As a Ponga member, you own your own pictures. They are your property, and yours alone. Your pictures remain private unless you share them. Ponga's login and sharing functions allow you to control who sees your pictures and the content you've added to them. When you share a picture or an album, you're sharing a link.

Your guests can explore for as long as they like, or until you revoke access. Unless you explicitly give your guests a link to cloud storage for your images, they cannot download the image with its associated content. Keep in mind that they can always take screenshots, but for the high-resolution images you might add to Ponga, that's hardly comparable.

Designed for the long run

Ponga is designed to capture the kinds of stories and archives families want to share and pass down to heirs, so your account is also designed for the long run. While we put the final touches on our Legacy Memberships, rest assured that

1. The images you upload in standards-based formats are archived and protected with long-term storage. Any curated metadata you may have added to these images is retained. Should you request your files back, you'll get exactly the image you uploaded to Ponga. Our systems start with a working copy of the files you upload. Learn more about archives of uploaded images.
2. the content you add to your pictures is all captured and retained in standards-based formats. When you add comments to your pictures, it's added as plain text in any language. Voice recordings added in comments are retained in a streaming standard called .ogg format. Learn more about recording formats. Any embedded media like YouTube videos, PDF documents from the web and the like are retained as web links or URLs. If you're concerned about the long-term viability of those links, we recommend storing associated content on cloud storage services you control such as a Google Drive folder.

You'll find more about that in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

What if I cancel my paid subscription or become inactive?

We appreciate that sometimes circumstances change and you might need to pause subscription services you pay for regularly. To ensure that your collection of precious photographs and the stories and research related to them remain safe, we developed a policy for "inactive" accounts.

A deleted account is one where all content and even logins have been removed from our servers. An inactive account, however, is one where the content remains private on our servers, but can be accessed by the owner and shared again later.

Learn more about deleting or deactivating accounts here.