Everpix. Modern Memory Management.
The days of stacking bookshelves with photo albums, and worrying what to do in an emergency are thankfully over. Unfortunately, today’s current digital situation is only marginally better. Freed from the cost and storage of film, we fill up our memory cards with thousands of photos without thinking about the coming burden of where to securely save all those photos. Current photo management solutions mostly exist for our PC's—which we are using less while tablets claim their place in our lives. After a few years of storing all these digital photos, we've realized that keeping photos on our hard drives is unsustainable.
Consider: Embracing the Firehose
Full Disclosure: A friend of mine is a co-founder and designer for this still blooming service. But I also have a friend at Flickr—so I'm not playing favorites.
When the service first launched there were undoubtedly growing pains, but I have recently become a devoted convert to the cloud focused photo service. Everpix feels like the only good example today of a solution that fully embraces the abilities of the internet to harness our photo management problems. And, it is the only solution I’ve used that recognizes people don't have time to organize ALL their photos into albums.
In the storage compartment, there are still technological hurtles to photos floating up into the cloud as invisibly as the iCloud + iPhone combination. But Everpix makes a valiant effort to make this as easy as possible. Myself, I've switched to a no PC model. Sync the photos from my Canon to the iPad. And let the Everpix iPad app pull them into the cloud for safe keeping. Fortunately the iPad and iPhone app experiences are first class. Though slightly behind the web experience.
Next comes embracing the lack of traditional albums. All other photo management solutions put high priority on album creation. It is natural to want to assemble your best photos into albums. But speaking for myself, I don't have time or the desire to group all my photos into albums after I come back from a trip. And more often than not, I'm dealing with a few random photos taken throughout the day. These are photos I don't necessarily want to lose, but I don't need them in an album either. Everpix is a photo stream for your entire life, organized automatically by 'moments' or 'days.'Gone are laboring hours of sorting through photos after a trip.
Everpix has realized the modern purpose of assembling an album is for sharing a set of photos with your friend. Sharing is the new Album. Share a set of photos to a friend, and you've basically accomplished the goal of albums—and Everpix does this quite well. Improvements are direly needed though. For one, sharing photos from different moments as one sharable collection is sorely missing. And I'd like these shared collections to be visible inside the app. Thereby accomplishing the goal of albums without the weight.
Everpix is primarily a private experience. Facebook is inherently public, making it hard to use Facebook as a primary place to store all my photos online. The strong emphasis on album creation is a by-product of social. Flickr, which has been waning, has many of the same album + social precedents. Even today in the age of social, I still want a private way to store my photos, with full control over when a collection gets put out into public view. Perhaps a new generation will think differently.
