🧡 About Us

Yesterday Memories started with a box of tapes nobody had pressed play on, and a cousin from Italy who couldn't stop asking questions.

A couple of mates and a box of tapes

One of us had a father who came out from Puglia, in southern Italy, in the early 1960s. He was a man who filmed everything. Super 8 first, then VHS when the technology arrived. Birthdays, weddings, backyard cricket, Sunday lunches that went until dark. Decades of family life, captured on magnetic tape and stored in a cabinet. Those tapes sat there for years. Through house moves and milestones and everything that life throws at a family. Just sitting. Waiting.

Nobody pressed play.

Not because nobody cared. Because pressing play on a tape of your parents — young, alive, laughing in a moment that's gone — is heavier than people think. The cabinet sat there for years before the first tape finally played through. And when it did, it was every bit as beautiful, and as heavy, as expected.

• • •

The cousin who changed everything

Around the same time, a cousin came over from Italy for a visit. She spent hours sitting on the floor going through family photos, asking questions, hungry for a history she'd never had access to. Watching her was the moment it clicked. This wasn't just about one family's tapes in one cabinet. Every family has that box. Every family has those tapes degrading in a garage somewhere — and every year they sit there, the magnetic signal fades a little more. The oxide flakes. The binder breaks down.

The memories don't wait for you to be ready.

What we actually do

We digitise VHS and VHS-C tapes at high quality settings, preserving everything that's left on the tape before it fades any further. We capture the signal as it exists today — we can't restore what's already been lost to time, but we can stop the clock right now. We convert at very high bitrates, because that's what matters with analog video. Not resolution — bitrate. The number of dots on the screen was always limited by VHS. But the richness of the colour, the smoothness of the motion, the warmth of the sound — that's all in the bitrate. And we don't compress it away. Your files come back on USB, ready to play on any device. Down the track, we're building something bigger too — private family websites where your whole extended family can watch, comment, and contribute their own memories. Because a video of Nonna making pasta isn't just a file. It's a gathering place.

Who we are

Two mates from Fremantle who think family memories are worth saving. One of us handles the technical side — the digitisation, the archiving, the slightly obsessive attention to signal quality. The other handles the people side — the pickups, the drop-offs, the conversations, and the reassurance that your tapes are in good hands. And then there's Reely — our cassette-headed mascot, who handles morale.

We do this for love. One tape at a time.