Pianyu

How Pianyu Works: Fragments, Stories, a Lifetime

Pianyu is not a tool you use once. It's a way of keeping that compounds: the more you collect, the more there is to shape, and the more there is to shape, the closer each book gets to being the one you'd hand to someone.

Here is the whole loop, stated plainly.

1. Fragments — thirty seconds, no project

A fragment is one small thing, kept. A photo from today with a line about it. A voice note: you press the mic, say what happened, and the words become text. Nothing is organized yet. Nothing has to be.

Most people keep fragments for weeks without thinking about books. That's correct. A fragment is allowed to be unfinished — it's just not allowed to stay scattered.

You talk for forty seconds. It becomes a page.

2. Time stops — the moments you'd otherwise skip

Some days deserve more than a fragment. Pianyu prompts you at the points that make a life legible: the first day of school, a birthday, the last day in an old house, a hospital discharge. You answer in your own words or your own voice. The prompts never supply the memories. They just ask.

3. The algorithm looks at what you've collected and makes suggestions

After a while — usually a month or two of fragments — Pianyu starts telling you what it can already see:

"These 40 photos and 9 voice notes are one trip. That could become a book."

"You've told six stories about your father's workshop. That could become a chapter."

You can ignore every suggestion. But this is where keeping becomes making: the system never decides what your story is — it only notices, from your own material, what has already started to form. No prompt is generic, because none of it is assembled from outside. Every suggestion is drawn from what you actually collected.

4. Stories — fragments, strung in order

When you accept a suggestion, the fragments are laid out as a story: one photo, one passage, in sequence. You can reorder, cut, rewrite. The layout work — margins, chapter breaks, captions, contents page — is handled. The facts and the voice are not touched.

This is the part every "AI story tool" gets wrong. A memoir generator will take forty seconds of speech and return a paragraph that reads like a novel. It sounds better and it isn't yours. Pianyu's AI arranges. It does not write you.

The paper decides what fits

We don't pick a layout and then force the content into it. The page is solved: given the trim size, the number of photos and each photo's aspect ratio, and the word count, the engine works out what actually fits — line length, line count, text block height — gives the remainder to the images, and then checks the result. Input is fixed, so output is fixed. That is why the same photos always produce the same book, and why a bad page can be caught by a test rather than by an argument.

Two numbers do the deciding, not a designer's taste:

So Chinese books default to photo-above-text, English books may go left-right, and an availability matrix — paper × language × structure — decides which combinations pass instead of a template list someone has to defend.

It isn't that we lack good templates. It's that this sheet can't hold two columns. A constraint conflict isn't a bug; it's the edge of the design. Because it can be computed, it can be explained.

5. A Lifetime — the book that's assembled from everything

Keep several stories long enough and one becomes possible: a whole life, split into chapters, each stage a section of its own. This is not a mode you select on day one. It's what the collection grows into — which is why it can only be built from fragments and stories that were actually kept.

Up to 250 old photos sit alongside the text. The oldest material usually arrives last: shoebox scans, a brother's camera roll, ten years of a chat app's saved images. You gather them in, and they slot into the timeline where they belong.

6. The Family Circle — more than one pair of hands

A life isn't documented by one person. In Pianyu, family members add to the same record: a daughter in Vancouver uploads the school photos she's kept; a son in Fujian scans his mother's wedding pictures. Each person's material stays on their own device until they send a contribution into the circle. When you assemble the book, everything the circle agreed to share comes in.

The cross-generation view is what people find they can't stop showing: dad at ten, you at ten, grandfather at ten, laid on one timeline. Nobody invented that format. It falls out of keeping things.

7. The Vault — where finished books live

Every completed book — fragment collections, stories, the big one — sits in the Vault. It's your library, kept in your browser. You can open a book years later, page through it, and export it again. Nothing streams from a company's server, which means nothing disappears when a company does.

8. Once a year, there's a new book to make

This is the rhythm the whole design is built around: gather once a year, shape what's new, export what's finished. Each year's book is a real thing — new material, the year already reviewed by you, layouts you haven't used yet. Not the same file re-downloaded. A different volume, with this year in it.

The card library runs on the same clock. Through the year, Pianyu turns your best fragments into cards — your own photographs, not stock art. They wait in the library, and once a year they're handed to you: export the set, print them if you like, and lay them against your parents' at the same age. We hold them for you until then. The export is always yours. Platforms close; files don't.

Gather once a year. Nothing scatters that way.

The rules we keep to ourselves

Start with one fragment → · What each book costs →