What Happened to Lifecake, and Can You Still Get Your Photos Back?

Lifecake was a private family photo-and-video app, started in London in 2012 and acquired by Canon Europe in 2015. Lifecake announced its own shutdown in April 2020, giving users a short window to either download their memories or move them into BackThen, a new app built by Lifecake's original founders, before the service closed on June 30, 2020. If you're finding this because you had a Lifecake account, the honest answer is: the original service is gone for good, and your options now depend on whether you migrated to BackThen when you had the chance.

The verified timeline

Here's what's actually documented, pulled from press coverage, user reviews, and the successor app's own account of events, not guesswork.

When	What happened	Source type
2012–2013	Lifecake founded in London by four ex-Skype, Qualcomm, and Yahoo engineers; launched as a private photo/video timeline for families	Tech press (TechCrunch, PetaPixel)
April 23, 2015	Canon Europe acquires Lifecake outright: team, technology, and roughly 350,000 registered users	Canon's own press release, covered by TechCrunch and PetaPixel
2015–2020	Lifecake operates as a free Canon-owned app	App store history
April 30, 2020	Lifecake's own website and social accounts announce the service will close, giving users until June 30 to download their data or migrate to BackThen	Lifecake's own site and social posts, discussed in real time on Hacker News
June 30, 2020	Lifecake officially shuts down, as announced two months earlier	Lifecake's own announced date; contemporaneous Trustpilot and App Store reviews
2020	BackThen launches as a separate company, founded by Lifecake's original team, offering a migration path for photos, videos, and comments	BackThen's own App Store listing and support documentation

A few things worth being precise about, since this is the whole point of writing this piece: Lifecake's own website and social accounts did publicly announce the closure, on April 30, 2020, with a firm June 30, 2020 shutdown date, giving users a two-month window to act. What never happened is a Canon corporate press statement explaining why: Canon's press office never weighed in the way it did for the 2015 acquisition, so the reasoning behind the decision is still user speculation, even though the fact and timing of the shutdown itself were properly announced by Lifecake directly. You'll see a few directory sites online citing a different, later shutdown year; those don't match Lifecake's own April 2020 announcement or the reviews people were posting in real time, describing a rushed, pandemic-era closure, so treat this timeline as the more reliable of the two.

Can I still get my photos out?

Directly from Lifecake, no. The app is gone from both app stores, lifecake.com no longer operates as it did, and there's no account left to log into.

Your realistic options now:

• If you migrated to BackThen back in 2020: your photos, videos, and comments should still be there. BackThen offers a free tier (1GB) and a paid tier for more storage, and it's a real, currently operating app, not an abandoned shell.
• If you did a local "download all" instead of migrating: whatever landed in that download is your archive now. Reviewers who went this route describe it as messy: dates on photos coming through inconsistently, and files arriving as nested zip folders rather than a clean, sorted timeline. Worth re-sorting once by actual date if you haven't already, while you still remember roughly when things happened.
• If you never downloaded or migrated anything: there isn't a recovery path. This is the hard, honest answer: a closed consumer app with no stated data-retention policy isn't something you can appeal to years later.

The real lesson: platform risk is a real risk

This isn't a scare story; plenty of family-photo apps run for years without incident, and closures like Lifecake's are the exception, not the rule. But it's worth saying plainly: the memory itself doesn't disappear when an app shuts down, but easy access to it does. Lifecake didn't lose anyone's photos through malice or a data breach; it lost them through the ordinary business reality of an acquired product getting deprioritized, then closed, by a much larger parent company that had other priorities.

The takeaway isn't "don't trust any app with your family's photos." It's narrower than that: know what happens to your account if a company folds, gets acquired, or just moves on, and don't let "download your data" be a step you plan to do "later," because later is exactly the window that closed on Lifecake users with only days of notice. A private vault is only as durable as your actual, current ability to get your own memories out of it whenever you want, not just in theory. That distinction (apps that merely store photos versus apps built to actually keep them) is the lens we use in our breakdown of the best memory keeping apps, if you're evaluating candidates now.

Where former Lifecake families are going now

A few different paths, depending on what you actually need:

• BackThen: the direct successor, built by Lifecake's original founders. If your family already migrated here, it's the most continuous option: same team's approach to a private, chronological family timeline, plus features like automatic photo organization and print products. It's a separate company from Lifecake, not Lifecake under new management, which matters if you're wondering who you're trusting with new photos going forward.
• FamilyAlbum: a private photo-sharing app used by millions of families, with invite-only albums, automatic organization by month and child's age, and a genuinely generous free storage tier. It's a mature, currently well-supported alternative if what you liked about Lifecake was the simple, private timeline format; our honest FamilyAlbum review verifies its safety, ownership, and free-tier limits if you're vetting it seriously.
• Tinybeans: another private, invite-only family journal, built around daily/weekly digest emails to the relatives you invite and a milestone tracker alongside photos. If your family used Lifecake mostly to keep grandparents and aunts and uncles updated without a public feed, Tinybeans covers that same job.
• Ourtifacts: a different shape of tool worth mentioning here, full disclosure: it's ours. Rather than one photo stream, Ourtifacts is a private vault built around a child, where invited family members contribute voice-recorded memories (no app install, just a link) alongside photos, text, and video, and a parent controls who sees what. The honest overlap with the Lifecake story: it's invite-only, ad-free, and your export options and account ownership are questions worth asking of any app you're evaluating, including this one.

If your family is deciding between these, best app to share baby photos with family and tinybeans alternatives go deeper on the photo-sharing-specific comparison, and best baby journal apps covers the broader category if what you actually want is more of a journal than a photo stream.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to Lifecake? Lifecake, a private family photo app acquired by Canon Europe in 2015, announced its own closure on April 30, 2020, with a June 30, 2020 shutdown date, and users were told to download their data or migrate it to BackThen, a new app built independently by Lifecake's original founders. Canon's press office never issued its own public explanation for the closure; the announcement came from Lifecake's own channels.

Is Lifecake still available to download? No. The app has been removed from both the App Store and Google Play, and the original lifecake.com site is no longer operating as a service.

Can I still export my old Lifecake photos? Only if you migrated to BackThen during the original 2020 transition window, or made a local download at the time. There's no way to retrieve data from Lifecake directly today.

Is BackThen the same company as Lifecake? No. BackThen was founded by the same people who built Lifecake, but it operates as a separate, independently owned company with no ties to Canon or to Lifecake's original ownership.

Don't let another archive become a "what happened to" story

Whatever app your family chooses next, ask it the same question this whole post is built around: if this company closes tomorrow, what happens to what you've saved here, and how fast could you get it out? Ourtifacts is built around that answer: it's free to start, invite-only, and the whole point is a private vault of your child's story, in your family's own voices, that's actually yours. Take a look at ourtifacts.com.