Trove vs FamilyAlbum: Unlimited Storage or a Delivered Edition?
Short answer
Trove sends your family one curated edition a week — the best photos, laid out, with a short written summary — to anyone with an inbox, free with no cap on photos, children or recipients, and the same month can be printed and posted for $4.99 a month. FamilyAlbum is the better box: unlimited photos, unlimited video, unlimited storage, permanently free, plus eleven free prints a month for every member (not just subscribers — that is a common error, including one of ours). What it does not do is compose or deliver. Relatives get a push or email alert per upload and then open the app, or a browser version an Admin can invite them to, and every three months a fifteen-second "1s Movie" turns up. Its milestones, monthly journals and per-child face grouping are real but sit behind Premium Family at $5.99 a month, and search is comment-text only on the $109-a-year Pro tier. Same price for the archive. One of them arrives composed.
FamilyAlbum, previously called mitene, is the most-recommended free option in this category and deservedly so. Its free tier is not a trial or a teaser: unlimited photos, unlimited videos, unlimited storage, permanently, plus eleven free prints a month for every member of the album. That is a genuinely hard offer to beat, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
So the interesting question is not which app is cheaper. Both are free. The question is what each one is actually built to do once the photos are in.
At a glance
| Trove | FamilyAlbum | |
|---|---|---|
| What arrives, and how often | One curated edition, emailed every Sunday | A notification per upload, plus a 1s Movie every 3 months |
| What the recipient needs | An email address | An account — in the app, or the browser version an Admin invites them to |
| Laid out, with a written summary | ||
| Free plan | Everything, free — unlimited photos, children and recipients | Unlimited photos, video and storage; 11 free prints a month for every member |
| Printed edition posted | Paper Edition, posted monthly, $4.99/mo | |
| Video limit | 3 minutes per clip | 2 minutes per video, free; 10 minutes on Premium |
| Paid plan | No paid app plan; print from $4.99/mo | One $2.99/mo; Family $5.99/mo or $59/yr; Family Pro $10.99/mo or $109/yr |
| Curation | AI picks and lays out the best of the week | Sorted by month; automatic 1s Movies and AI print suggestions |
| Prints and printed editions | Photo books from $29.99; Paper Edition $4.99/mo | 11 free prints/month for every member ($3.99 shipping); photobooks from $13.99 |
| Search | Semantic, by child and date | Comment text only, Premium Family Pro |
| Milestones | First steps, words, tooth, birthdays, custom | In Personal Pages (Premium Family, Admins only) |
| Automatic face grouping | Per-child pages via face recognition (Premium Family) | |
| 'This time last year' flashbacks | 'On This Day' slideshows — 3 items free, unlimited on Premium | |
| Reactions and comments | ||
| Contributor and viewer roles | Admin, contributor, viewer, newsletter | Admins and Members; member uploads are an Admin toggle |
| Share links with expiry and view caps | ||
| Originals kept | No — uploads are resized |
Where FamilyAlbum is genuinely better
Raw storage. If you want somewhere to put fifteen years of photos and videos without ever thinking about a quota, FamilyAlbum is the strongest free offer available. Nothing else in the category matches it.
Eleven free prints a month, for everyone. This is better than we used to say it was: the prints are not a paid-plan perk. Every member of the album — the free plan included — can order eleven free prints and a free monthly card on their first print order each month, paying only $3.99 shipping. Four grandparents in the album means four sets of prints.
A browser version for relatives. An Admin can invite someone to the browser version rather than the app; they view, download and comment from a computer, phone or tablet with a login and no install. There is a Digital Frame too, which shows eleven recommended photos a month without anyone opening anything.
Maturity. It has been around a long time, has a very large user base, and its apps are polished on both iOS and Android. Trove is newer.
Two free-tier caveats worth knowing
FamilyAlbum's free plan caps each video at two minutes, which will cut off a school concert or a first-steps video that runs long. And every upload is resized, so what you download later is not your original — keep the originals somewhere else.
What each one actually sends
FamilyAlbum solves storage. It does not solve composition.
It is not true, and we used to say it, that nothing reaches relatives. Members get a push notification when photos go up, browser-version invitees get an email with a link, and every three months FamilyAlbum compiles a one-second-per-clip "1s Movie" for everyone (monthly on Premium). What none of that is, is an edition: there is no scheduled set of the month's photographs laid out and sent. The notification says something happened; the photographs stay where they are.
Trove composes instead. Every Sunday it emails one edition — the best photos of the week, laid out properly, with a short written summary and the milestones — to everyone on your list. Recipients install nothing and create no account. If they can read email, they are set up.
- No app and no account for recipients, so the least technical relative is not quietly excluded.
- Unlimited recipients on the free plan.
- AI curation means no weekly editing chore — the thing you would eventually stop doing.
- Video up to 3 minutes per clip, with no paid tier to be upgraded into.
- Milestones, face grouping, flashbacks and semantic search are free; FamilyAlbum charges $5.99 to $10.99 a month for its versions.
That last point is the one that changed most on re-checking. FamilyAlbum does have milestones, monthly journal entries and per-child pages built by face recognition — they live in Personal Pages, a Premium Family feature, and only Album Admins can write the journal. It has "On This Day" slideshows too, limited to three items unless you pay. And it has search, of a kind: comment text only, on Premium Family Pro at $109 a year. Trove does all four free. The honest summary is that FamilyAlbum wins on being a bigger, older box, and Trove wins on what gets composed and sent out of it.
Print is the other thing that happens after. FamilyAlbum gives every member eleven prints a month for $3.99 shipping and sells photobooks from $13.99; Trove sells print rather than bundling it — photo books from $29.99 as a one-off, and the Paper Edition, a printed edition of your month posted on the 1st for $4.99 a month including one mailing address ($4 a month for each extra, US only). That is the option for a relative who will not open an app or an email. Neither is a plan: everything in the Trove app itself stays free.
The short version
- Pick Trove ifyou want the week composed and sent rather than stored and announced — and you want milestones, face grouping, flashbacks and search without a subscription.
- Pick FamilyAlbum ifyou mainly want unlimited free storage, you want the eleven free prints a month for everyone, and your family will genuinely open the app or its browser page.
- Use both ifyou want FamilyAlbum as the archive and Trove as the distribution. Both free plans, so this costs nothing — and if you only keep one, keep the one your family actually reads.
Is FamilyAlbum really free?+
Yes. The free plan includes unlimited photo and video uploads with unlimited storage, indefinitely, plus eleven free prints a month for every member. The main free-tier limits are that each video is capped at two minutes and every upload is resized. Premium Family is $5.99/month or $59/year and Premium Family Pro $10.99/month or $109/year (there is also an individual Premium One at $2.99/month); they add ten-minute videos, Personal Pages with milestones and journals, comment search on Pro, computer upload and ad-free browsing, rather than unlocking basic use.
Do grandparents need to install FamilyAlbum?+
They need an account, not necessarily the app. An Album Admin can invite them to the browser version instead, where they can view, download and comment from any computer, phone or tablet — the feed is chronological rather than sorted by month, and they cannot upload. This is the core difference from Trove, whose weekly edition is an ordinary email with no account behind it at all.
Does FamilyAlbum have milestones or face grouping?+
Both, on Premium Family at $5.99 a month. Personal Pages are built automatically by facial recognition from the information you enter about each child, and they hold milestones and monthly journal entries — which only Album Admins can write. On the free plan neither exists. Trove does both free.
Can I use both FamilyAlbum and Trove?+
Yes, and some families do exactly that — FamilyAlbum as the unlimited archive, Trove as the thing that composes the week and gets it in front of relatives. Both have free plans, so running both costs nothing.
Which has better search?+
Trove, clearly. Trove searches the photographs themselves in plain English and filters by child and date range, free. FamilyAlbum searches the text of comments you and your family have left, and only on Premium Family Pro at $10.99 a month or $109 a year; the free plan has no search at all.
Storage is solved. Composition is not.
Trove emails your family one curated edition of the week, every Sunday. Unlimited recipients, no app for them, free forever.
Get Trove — FreePricing and features were checked on September 21, 2026. Competitors change their plans — if you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
