Why
Pets do not live forever — the memories can
A dog lives ten to fifteen years on average, a cat twelve to eighteen. That is long enough for them to become inseparable from the family, and long enough that every moment is worth keeping.
Phone albums vanish when the handset changes. Social memories are shallow and rationed. VowVet builds a photo gallery per pet, stored on R2, organised automatically by date and tagged by kind — face, full body, play, illness, milestone.
Photo types
Each kind of photo does a different job
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Face / profile
Close portraits — used for the avatar and for matching if your pet is lost. Retake every three months; puppies change fast.
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Full body
Several angles of the whole animal — this is what body condition scoring reads over time, and what sighting matches compare against.
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Distinguishing marks
Whatever is unique: a scar, a white patch on the crown, a birthmark. Critical for identification.
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Nose print 🆕
A close-up of the nose — more on this below.
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Milestone moments
The birthday, the day you moved house, the day they learned something new. Tag them so five years from now you still know why the photo mattered.
The science
A nose print is a pet's fingerprint
Every pet's nose print is unique — no two alike anywhere in the world, exactly as with human fingerprints. The pattern is made of ridges, pores and the contour of the shape. It sets permanently at around three months old and does not change for the rest of their life.
In the United States and Japan, nose prints already serve as identification evidence in ownership disputes and in official lost-and-found processes. In Vietnam the technology is still at an early research stage — VowVet is building the dataset.
How you can help
Uploading a nose print helps the community and protects your pet
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How to take it
About 10cm away. A clean, dry nose. Indirect flash or natural daylight. A phone camera is enough — no special equipment.
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What VowVet does with it
Stored encrypted on R2. We extract a feature vector rather than keeping raw images for machine learning. When a pet is missing and a sighting includes a nose print, AI matching compares the patterns and returns a confidence score.
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Privacy
Nose prints are never public in the QR passport — only the owner and an authorised vet can see them. That closes off the obvious misuse.
"One day this technology may be the only thing that proves they are yours. Today, it is simply a lovely memory.
An automatic yearbook
Every year's end, VowVet makes you a keepsake
On 31 December the system generates a yearbook: the twelve best photos (chosen by AI on sharpness, composition and face detection), the milestone log, the weight curve, vaccines completed, and every adventure you shared. Export it as a printable PDF.
Some owners have had it printed and hung it in the living room. Some give it to their parents at Tet. A few have kept the yearbook after their pet died — as a way of saying goodbye properly.