People have been taking digital photos for over a decade. Inarguably, digital cameras from the most basic point-and-shoot to the highest end professional camera have changed how we take, store and use pictures. Less than twenty years ago, you would go on vacation, take a roll or two of film, drop it off at a lab, and an hour later have two sets of prints to share with your family and friends. You arranged them in an album or scrapbook, then put it on the coffee table to look at periodically. These days, you go on vacation, fill a 16 GB memory card, and maybe download them to your computer. Maybe. If you do, maybe you actually go through them and upload a set to Facebook. Or, you Instagram your $20 cheeseburger with artisanal fries, tweet it, and forget about it. Still, to actually organize and share your shots, it’s a lot of time in front of the computer on your end, and most of the time the photos just end up in digital storage never to be seen again. The average user stores over 10,000 digital photos.
Cognizant of this, the developers at Everpix have come up with an innovative solution to unearth your pictures from darkest recesses of your hard drive into intuitive galleries that make it easy to not only view, but share with family and friends with email, social media, and smartphone apps. Once you download the uploader tool, you choose the devices from which Everpix should gather your photos – your hard drive, an external hard drive, the cloud, Facebook, Flickr – and it starts to synch.
Using the metadata and image analysis, photos are automatically organized into easy-to-see groups by date.
Click on one of the photos, and it takes you deeper into the photos from that day. Sharing is pretty simple; for example, to share via email, there is a paper airplane icon in the upper right corner – click on that, select up to 40 photos that you want to share, click next, and fill in the address and a note. The recipient can see the photos in the email, with options to take them to Everpix for a free account to view or download the selected pictures. Pictures can also be shared on Facebook, Twitter, or in an album with other Everpix users.
In essence, Everpix gathers your photos from all of the different places you save them and organizes them in easy-to-see and browse collections. There are several ways to see the photos organized – Highlights, Moments and Sources. A new neat feature that became available to the public this week is Explore, which organizes the photos on a content level. You are taken to a page with six icons; Food, Nature, City, People, Animals, and Shuffle. Click on an icon and using their unique algorithms, you’re shown a random selection of photos. The goal here is for you see your photos again as memories, not JPGs.
While the files are stored in the cloud, your account is private. If you share photos, only the photos that you select to share are seen by the recipient. Everpix employees only access them if there is an issue and you give them permission – they are not used for ads or otherwise made public. Your metadata is not stripped. Your photos remain entirely yours. Likewise, if you decide to delete your account, it’s completely deleted.
Currently the app available for the iPhone, and the Android app is in development. (The website is easily usable on an Android phone.) Another really cool feature for iPhone and iPad users is that through the app, you can order prints from Walgreens and pick them up within an hour. Also available starting March 5 is their “Freemium” account – unlimited storage of a year of full-res photos. Premium accounts – unlimited storage of photos from any time frame – is $49/year or $4.99/month with a 30-day trial.
Navigating around the Everpix site, there’s a lot to like and look forward to as it is developed further. It’s an astonishingly simple, forward-thinking way to take the drudgery out of being overwhelmed by the thousands of photos that our digital collections have become. Everpix is for you if you haven’t seen your photos from that awesome Caribbean vacation in 2010, or had the chance to download your kids birthday shots from last year.
I should probably use this, too! (full disclosure – these are my kitties)
Interesting. Glad to see companies are coming up with ways to address the downsides of digital storage. It’s a struggle for me to keep my photos well-organized.