After reading my post on Everpix the other day, a friend asked, “Why would you pay for that service if you’re already paying for Flickr?”
His good question prompted me to think more about Everpix … and to realize the critical features I hadn’t mentioned in that last post. So, if you’re on the fence about Everpix, consider these points:
Would Automatic Organization be Useful to You? In iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom (and, by extension, on services like Flickr.com), organization is up to you. What sets do you want these photos in? How do you want them tagged? How will you categorize them?
If you have a lot of photos, that’s a lot of decisions to make. By contrast, Everpix automagically organizes your photos for you — primarily by date taken, but also by grouping related photos in “Moments.” Filenames don’t matter. It’s the digital equivalent of tossing photos in a magic filing cabinet that sorts and groups them effortlessly for you.
Post Anywhere, Pull to One Place. Post a photo to Flickr? It shows up in Everpix. Post a photo to Facebook? It shows up in Everpix. Tweet a photo of your best friend sledding down a snowy hill on top of a rusty car hood? It will show up in Everpix. Once you link your accounts to Everpix, the entire process is automatic.
How Does Unlimited Storage Sound? Every photo, everywhere — that’s what Everpix promises. And it’s true: you can’t upload too much. (I’ve uploaded more than 40 gigs of photos, and Everpix absorbed ’em all without a hitch.)
On the Other Hand … Everpix is not a social sharing solution. While it can push your photos to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, there is no community within Everpix, beyond a feature that allows Everpix users to “photomail” images to each other.
And while it’s true that all your photos are up on Everpix’s servers (even if you delete them from your devices and computers!), Everpix is really not a good back-up solution, mostly because there’s no way to batch download everything you’ve put there. If you suffered a mass hard drive failure (saints preserve us!), you’d get pretty tired of trying to download your photo collection image by image from the Everpix service.
What I’d LIke To See. I like Everpix, and I use the service almost daily to zip through my photo collection and find images I’d like to see again. I’m excited about features on the way, like finding similar photos with a click of the mouse or automatic tagging. That said, there are several things I’d love to see Everpix offer:
- Physical Objects. They’ve got all my photos. What if I want to do more than look at them or share ’em on Twitter? An alliance with a company that could convert my photos into books, postcards, calendars, swag, or other physical items would be nice. (You can already send photos from the iOS app to your local Walgreens for digital prints!)
- A Backup Option. They’ve got all my photos. Borrowing a page from Backblaze, why not offer me the option to purchase all of those images on a DVD or physical hard disk? In doing so, they would instantly convert Everpix into a valid backup option for photography.
- An API. I wish the photo and blogging apps I use on a regular basis were able to talk to and pull photos from Everpix as easily as they can from Flickr or Picasa. An Advanced Programming Interface for third party developers would be welcome.
And Back to the Question. Why pay for Everpix, especially if you already pay for Flickr?
Flickr’s a great place for sharing photos with the world (especially now that Instagram’s been co-opted by the Evil Empire). It’s a social space, with a huge community. It’s designed to generate comments and favorites — to get people talking about the photos they take.
Everpix, by contrast, is your magic, self-organizing photo album containing every image you’ve ever taken. Flickr will show you what you deliberately post to Flickr, but Everpix will find, import, and organize every photo you share from any service. It makes those images almost instantly accessible from any device with an Internet connection, and makes browsing them a breeze. If fast access to any photo you’ve ever taken — without ever having to be concerned with organization or your remaining storage space — is important to you, Everpix is the way to go.
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