It all started last spring, when Swampscott native Mark Yarmarkovich, 28, saw an art exhibit.

The artist had made over 10,000 buttons the kind you pin on your shirt -- using images from magazines and other types of old and new media, Yarmarkovich said in a recent interview. The walls of the gallery were covered in buttons. Each of the buttons seemed to capture a small part of a larger image, similar to how our mind tends to remember smaller fragments of a whole experience.

That display instantly sparked an idea, and ultimately led to the creation of a mobile app.

I thought the buttons looked really beautiful and that it would be a cool way to let people capture their own memories, he said.

And thus, Memento Studio was born.

Available for free through the App Store, Memento Studio is an app that allows users to take photos, edit them and then customize items using that photo. Users can upload a photo onto different items such as magnets, pins, bottle openers, key chains and more.

The app allows people to capture memories and create personalized gifts, encapsulated in a high quality form that looks really nice wherever you want to put it, Yarmarkovich said.

But it wasnt easy turning his idea into something real.

The process was long and involved more hurdles than I originally anticipated, he said. But I was lucky to work with a talented developer who made the functionality of this app really great. There were a lot of other factors that went into establishing a company, refining the manufacturing process, and deciding on the features of the app. It became kind of a tradeoff between wanting to launch the app and wanting to continue improving it before putting it out there.

Once the app was ready, Yarmarkovich submitted it to Apple. After it was reviewed and accepted by Apple, Yarmarkovich could now start helping people create something with their photos.

Original post:

Swampscott native brings memories to life with mobile app