So this looks amazing... and I want to buy into it... but I was just burned by Snapjoy several months ago.
I feel like I'll pay the money... spend my time syncing my library and getting everything organized... and then someone else is going to snatch you guys up and shut it down.
Clearly you guys have a business model and a product you're selling. If I can't even rely on you guys being in business long-term, what can I do? But you guys have built an amazing product! Keep up the good work!
I completely agree with you. I looked at the site originally, and thought, "eh. another app that's going to be bought out by someone, probably" and left.
After reading some of the comments here, I went back and read it more carefully, and it totally looks like something I'd gladly pay a subscription to, but I've been burned before when places have closed after they've been bought out, it's not a nice feeling.
I'm still contemplating it though! It looks awesome.
I've also been thinking about this irony the past year or so. The startups that most evidently have their shit together in terms of product, design, branding, etc. are in a way the least "believable in", since they seem likely to quickly become catnip for acquirers. Sparrow, for one.
(Everpix founder here) We tried to make our privacy policy pretty clear and relatively easy to read at https://www.everpix.com/legal/privacy.html. What parts did you think were not detailed enough?
Do I still own my pictures once they are uploaded to your server? Does keeping my pictures stored on your server after the privacy policy changes count as 'continued use of the service'?
What Im getting at is if you get bought by Microsoft, where does it say that Microsoft cant take my pictures and use them in their next ad or sell them to someone else?
(Everpix founder here) Ah I see. Sorry I should have pointed you out to our Terms of Services instead [1]. Our Privacy Policy mostly covers what we do with visitor's data.
Because Everpix ends up storing the entire life in photos of each of our users, we are very very careful with privacy matters and our policies.
For instance, as you can see in the TOS section "Proprietary Rights in Content on Everpix Services", users fully own their photos and we do not claim any ownership rights. The only right we ask is the one to display your photos on our platform back to you and to users with whom you choose to share them with (kind of obvious but it doesn't hurt to say it). One last (edge) case is if you explicitly give us some of your photos to improve our science [2]. For such photos you are giving us some rights.
I'm waiting for someone to do this sort of thing the right way by setting up an endowment or trust and legal instruments that can guarantee preservation of hosting (as much as possible) for at least a decade into the future.
Why not offer an export to S3 or Drop Box or Etc... feature so to avoid this fear? I agree - not going to pay unless some back up (locally or otherwise) option is offered to mitigate this risk.
(Everpix founder here) Just to be clear, we certainly allow users to re-download photos in full-resolution and with all their metadata, but in batches from various places in www.everpix.com, not as a single gigantic multi-gigabytes ZIP archive (for technical reasons you can imagine but we are working on it).
Note that in the case of Everpix, one of our key goal is that no manual organization be needed. Just keep taking photos the way you are used to, let stuff sync in the background and we'll take care of the rest.
You can't really spend time organizing albums which could turn out to be wasted time in the future, since we don't even have manual albums or a trash. The only time you can spend with Everpix is more time enjoying your photo collection ;)
Hey -- deet already gave some info about Picturelife I'd also mention this: You can use your own S3 account with Picturelife and never pay us a dime. If we disappeared one day, all your photos would still be on your S3 account and with our free API you could get all your metadata out in a way you (or someone) could still use our frontend to access them. ~innonate, co-founder of Picturelife
Hosting your own gallery and deciding public-private-public-semi-lockdown must have occurred to you I reckon. And you can sure do that. Keep a back up all the time.
AAMOF if you've enough enough at your shared server or VPS then it will become another backup, in addition to local and remote( sth like backblaze, crashplan).
PS. I didn't use Snapjoy much but had few photos there. Just casually put over there after creating my a/c. It was some referral. I can't login now(it's alright) and the good old blog post link, is still there, in which they they promised our photos were safe they will get back to us. Did they?
(Everpix founder here) BTW if you love what you see, come join the team:
Our goal is to build the photo platform of the next 10 years, designed from the ground up for people's larger and larger photo collections, and today's photo taking patterns.
We have infrastructure scale (millions of full-res photos synced per day), cutting-edge photo science like nowhere else (3 level deep convolutional network type of semantic image analysis), and pixel-perfect design. We also have revenue and above average subscription rates.
We're looking for backend devs (Python + MySQL + Linux), sys ops (AWS) and Android devs. Sorry position descriptions are not posted yet, but if you're interested, ping us at info_at_everpix.com!
Also, I'd suggest adding (or switching to) a different model for pricing instead of mirroring Flickr's model. Something more oriented around charging for adding new photos so that if someone "lapses" on their subscription all their old stuff isn't suddenly inaccessible. For example, charging $100 a year for permanent image hosting for anything uploaded while under that subscription and then adding some sort of rate limit for adding new photos if the subscription lapses, or something like that.
Second, the site design is great but I think it could be improved significantly by making more bits actionable. For example, clicking on different parts of the pricing widget should take you to the appropriate page.
(Everpix founder here) We're still a small team and we much prefer on-site at this point. However we would be happy to relocate the right person - we are in SOMA in San Francisco.
- I'm using Picasa on the desktop. The sync tool works if I direct it to my Picasa folder, but things like photo rotations aren't applied. My lens doesn't record orientation so I have to manually rotate some photos in Picasa - this info is lost in the uploader so some of my pictures in Everpix are sideways - this is a showstopper for me.
(Everpix founder here) WRT Picasa orientation, that's certainly unexpected (first time we hear about this). Please use Contact Support from the uploader menu to file a support ticket so we can track this down. Thanks!
I've been testing Everpix today. You guys have really nailed it: clean, nice interface, fast browsing, easy syncing, automatic organization. Everything just works. And your Photo Mail sharing is almost perfect for my needs.
Are you planning to allow mass export? I understood that you are using propriety image compression, thus mass export might be quite heavy operation, However, it's a kind of showstopper for me, if you are not going to allow it in the future.
A comment about the website: For me at least, the huge, busy, out of focus video that can't be paused (Firefox 19.0.2 on Windows 7) was a major distraction - it took me quite a while to figure out where to look to find out what Everpix actually was. Something that might make the video more useful is subtitles saying what's happening.
They appear to be doing some A/B testing between the simpler landing page and the more comprehensive page. They'll probably appreciate your feedback, but base the decision on conversion rates. At least that's what I would do, but I don't know much.
Google drive or s3 support? I use google drive to keep GBs of photos on web bu off of my harddrive. I don't think any of your connected services (picasa / flickr) manage this as elegantly as Google Drive.
I explored Everpix. It started importing all of my photos from my account. It was seamless, I loved it, and wanted to explore more.
So I was about to upload from my NAS. I realized they don't support RAW. I guess having JPGs, etc are better than nothing but I don't shoot in JPG. I shoot in RAW and maybe convert to DNG.
I looked over the size of my library. I was shocked to learn the size. This made me realize I need something serious, reliable, etc. I reached out to their customer support and asked what exists or what is intended when I lose everything and want my entire archive. I received a link to a support article that didn't address my question. I asked again and they said they couldn't support such a request. Make sense but that's when I knew it wasn't the right fit.
Since then I've looked into Trovebox.com, Smugmug.com or just going manual with Amazon services, S3 or Glacier.
I'm using Crashplan because it offered a good deal. It took me two months to complete my initial backup (i didn't back up everything but I did backup my main Aperture library) and incremental backups (for two laptops and a Mac Pro) have been quick and painless.
Everpix is useless. Not only does it not handle RAW, it can't find pictures in libraries not in default locations.
As both a happy Crashplan user and a happy Everpix user, I don't think it's fair to compare the two directly. For me, Everpix is not primarily a backup service -- I shoot in RAW too, I also shoot movies, and for now Everpix doesn't help me with that. I use Everpix because I want to take my photo library on the go, so I can share photos with people or look at them myself, but my library is far too big (100 GB) to keep on my phone or my laptop, so Everpix allows me to take that library with me, and also allows me to easily process my photos too. The fact that it gives me a secondary backup (albeit only of my processed jpgs) is just a bonus.
Since I've been using Everpix, I've looked at, re-discovered and shared more photos in the last two months than I have in the last year or more before that. It's really been a joy to use. It's been like rediscovering my photo library all over again.
As for finding pictures in non-default locations, all I can say is that I've never had an issue with that and Everpix has worked seamlessly for me. I'm a very happy customer.
Sadly, I can't say the same for Crashplan. I like their service and their price point and am more than happy to keep using them, but their software hasn't been updated in a year (non-Retina, and not very mac-like) but far more importantly their de-duplication doesn't seem to work for me. When I wanted to move my photos folder to an external drive, it re-uploaded the whole 100 GB. I don't know if that's because of the security options I use or not, but I definitely have dedup enabled. If there was a solution, I couldn't find it. Clunky to say the least.
I think Everpix should be both a backup and sharing system, but I don't find it useful for either (since it won't find my actual main photo library but does cheerfully upload random stuff it finds elsewhere (um, sorry Everpix, but not everything in "Pictures" is a photo).
Crashplan ain't pretty, but that's not my top priority in a backup system.
+1 for CrashPlan. Have been using it for a couple years now, and have only had good experiences with it. (OSX)
Plus, you can configure it not just to back up to CrashPlan's servers, but to also back up to a NAS or similar -- so you've got your local backup in case of HD failure (obviously much quicker to restore from), but also got CrashPlan's backup in case of fire, etc.
These extra features make CrashPlan such a killer app otherwise I would have ditched them long ago for BackBlaze which has a native Mac app and their (BackBlaze's) interface is like at least 13X* times better than CrashPlan.
*note: a random number out of frustration. They have one(native app) in works since 2-3 years it seems.
I think Glacier shall be better as you wanted sth for backup. Some data that is just going to sit there needn't be costing those many dollars as it would cost you with S3. Reliability is all the same for all practical purposes. I am waiting for a Glacier client that saves my data in some format that I can read with any other client with the same key. Arq is Arq-to-Arq only.
Another option is CrashPlan. Been using it. You can have Glacier with CrashPlan too. It's that cheap.
As a very longtime Flickr user, I much welcome a quality Flickr replacement for those of us that want off site storage coupled with the ability to share with specific others in an easy manner.
I've been waiting for something like that for ages. Since nothing has been made I just bought a dropbox membership... damn. But I guess I can use both.
I'm testing it now:
* The facebook feature is awesome! Since you can't download the pictures you've been tagged in through facebook directly I manually download them. And it's a pain.
* The hidden feature scared me at first since I thought I deleted them. Then I found how I could reveal them, but I was expecting a "config" link or at least an icon resembling it instead of a dropdown under the date.
* The moment thing is great. I wish There was an "album" thing as well where I sort my stuff by folder since the moment thing is kinda broken for me (I have pictures from a lot of different sources : facebook, camera, phone, old phone 1, old phone 2, camera of my friends...).
* no android and windows phone version ? (I own a windows phone but a Android app should be your priority).
* enter your mail -> continue sign up. I really like this way of signing up, I'll have to experiment that on my websites as well :))
* if all the pictures of a moment are hidden, the moment is hidden and you can't seem to undo that.
* I have a folder inside my principle Picture folder that I'm uploading that contains... pictures from my exes :D I really didn't want to upload that!
* The moment thing is broken. Maybe if I could change the way it sort the moments to month-group the pictures it would be better.
---
Overall it really misses an ALBUMS section in the menu where I can manually classify my pictures.
Hope you guys will keep on, you have an amazing app here.
(Everpix founder here) Not exactly the same, but you can manually organize your photos "at the source" (e.g. folders, iPhoto events...) and Everpix mirrors the organization in the Sources view [1]. This is actually quite powerful as you can keep using the same organization tools you are already used to, while still reaping the benefits of Everpix.
(Everpix founder here) It most certainly should unless some of the photos are not compatible with Everpix (see https://support.everpix.com/entries/20972951-What-kind-of-ph...), older than 1 year if on the Free plan, or if Facebook API doesn't return us all of them (yes, we have seen issues with the API).
Feel free to reach out to support_at_everpix.com if you think something is amiss.
Like it, photography is an area underserved with new interesting ideas. There's a world of people who take more than Instagram pics, and this seems aimed at that demographic.
One problem though: since you're aiming at photography enthusiasts, you'll want a proper integration with Aperture by a plugin or something. The way it works using the uploader (taking the cached previews) is clunky and not granular enough.
Sync as many pictures as you want—there's no limit^1.
1. Everpix reserves the right to limit excessive use and the unlimited photos offer pertains to your personal, non-commercial use only.
Cut that shit out!
Advertising "unlimited" but having limits is illegal here and probably where you are too. Having fine print that contradicts large print is also illegal here.
I like the landing page. As I was reading through, I found something you may want to correct:
"Take more photos anyway! ... so you can _you_ enjoy all ..."
There is an additional "you" in this sentence. Just to clarify, I am not trying to offend anyone here, just trying to help. I think landing pages are important.
(Everpix founder here) Thanks for pointing out the typo! You're certainly right, landing pages matter and it'll be fixed in our next website deployment.
Also I think that you should not offer unlimited. What if someone will dump his favourite 100 PB of photos? If I would be using your service, I would not want you to go down due to abuses of your service's normal usage, i.e. normal users would be fine with such limit.
(Everpix founder here) Everpix was designed for scale and people' larger and larger photo collections to be entirely stored in our infrastructure.
Actually, we don't care so much about the number of GBs, but rather the number of photos. We have users with 100,000+ photos and it's all good as long as not for commercial use. Like you pointed out, in practice normal users have thousands of photos but not that many.
Nice design. Really like it and the interface. But before I commit to [any] new service, I would like to understand my future time commitment to [1] start with you and [2] stay with you.
I would suggest that you add a couple of Starting Up tutorials - smth like:
Tutorial 1/2/3
"I have my collection of photos on Ubuntu/Windows/MacBook"
Level Beginner
Time estimate 5-10-15 min
Goal: in 5 min your collection is backed-up and synced with your mobile device.
ToDo....................
If starting up with you is easy, then make it easy for people to discover this in the form they already got used to (most good libraries and plugins announced here have Quick Start Up section).
My photo collection is over 300 GB (I shoot raw) and I have a relatively slow internet connection; can I do a first sync by sending a hard disk somewhere?
(Everpix founder here) No we don't support receiving physical disks. However, our Mac [1] & Windows Uploaders [2] are really optimized so give it shot, you might be surprised. Please note that our servers are US based, so if outside the US, it's certainly not as fast.
On the website (http://getgush.com/), these words appear: "Thank you so much for trying Gush and working with us as we tested this concept. We have decided to not move forward with this project. As promised we will delete all of your data from our service and be shutting it down this week. Please uninstall any uploaders you have as they will stop working. We hope you enjoyed trying Gush."
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level web stretches far away.
So....I am a bit skeptical and would love for some clarity. I have been looking for something like this for my wife, for a while. She takes pictures like they are going out of style.
But...can you explain your economics to me.
How do you make money on users with huge libraries (300GB+)? The reason I want to know, is because I would feel more comfortable knowing that this is sustainable and properly thought out, than just some marketing ploy.
I have seen a few services launch with ridiculously low prices that ultimately prove not to be sustainable. This seems like it could potentially be one of those.
(Everpix founder here) You raise a fair question, but all I can share publicly is that we have a very optimized infrastructure designed from the ground up to deal with large amount of photos per user account.
I can assure you this is not a marketing ploy or some afterthought on how to make money. Everpix used to be subscription only (with 30 day trials), and we only recently added a Free tier, after we had a good understanding on how things would work.
This is brilliant. iTunes killed hierarchical organization for music, but we've still been stuck with it for photos (albums = folders). This could get rid of "albums" as we know them.
There is no difference between how iTunes and iPhoto work. They have a hierarchy internally (iTunes: albums, iPhoto: events). Then each element can be dragged into as many albums/playlists as desired, and dynamic albums/playlist can be created.
I haven't found anything in Everpix that I couldn't have gotten out of iPhoto... :(
My first thought was Apple or Google is going to buy this. Love the UI, but nobody is going to pay a subscription fee for it (and I doubt that is the business plan anyway).
> My first thought was Apple or Google is going to buy this. Love the UI, but nobody is going to pay a subscription fee for it (and I doubt that is the business plan anyway).
I think the price is fair, especially as a dedicated backup service (i.e. a third backup dest.). If their terms & features are strong enough they'll likely pick up a following from enthusiast photographers who are tired of Flickr/500px and want somewhere where private is the default.
I tried it two months back but didn't go premium as there's essentially no organisation. I am used to store pics in sync-date folder names like Picasa.
I just went for Picasa, which tags people efficiently, has other features and costs $2.49/month for 100 GB!
Though I left Picasa once they started uploading to Google+ by default. Private or not, I didn't like that. It also lacked some features as compared to Picasa Web. Now I just use Cubby to sync my photos folder and Picasa organises them.
I also paid recently, because this is the only service that I know of that lets me share e.g. baby pics with my family only, and creates attractive web albums automatically, but still let them download everything as a zip file.
I too was stumped by the seeming lack of organization, but if you use a tool like iPhoto or aperture, you can organize things by events as opposed albums. I hadn't really used events previously, so that took some figuring out.
Look for me it works pretty well once I did. I can generally let it just sync all my pictures from all my PCs and phones and so forth, but when I need to I can make an event in something like iPhoto, and then share that as a photo page with the zip file download option for my sharees.
Well worth the money so far, although we'll see what happens to their 'unlimited' storage when I really try to upload my 500 GB Aperture collection (which is only that big because I'm too lazy to ever delete photos)...
(Everpix founder here) You'd be surprised - our subscription rates actually tend to prove people are more than willing to pay for what we want to be a high-quality and very innovative photo platform :)
I'm one of those subscribers. I tried it out for a month, fell in love and signed up without a second thought. The only thing it lacks for me is handling all the videos from my cameras too.
People pay for Dropbox and iTunes Match (I did and I usually NEVER pay for things on internet). And since the price seems fair, I'm really considering buying it right now. So if this works on me, this is going to work on a lot of people.
Paying for it was a no-brainer for me. It's an easy to maintain, well designed site and app that's not a another backup black-hole where photos are safe, but too hard to actually look at. That's easily worth a few dollars a month/year.
Signed up, pointed it to the directory where I keep all my photos, and it seems unable to find the ones from the past year even though all my photos are organized by year. I have about 2 TB of photos (going back to 2000), and I shoot RAW+JPG. Is it possibly confused by the RAWs?
In that same vein, I don't see anything that says what image formats the service supports. Should I expect it now (or eventually) to support my RAW files or Photoshop edited or Lightroom edited files?
Supporting RAWs in a service like this is actually fairly difficult. Turning RAW files into something that can be displayed on the web or analyzed involves a lot of judgment calls by the software that does the RAW processing with regards to determining exposure settings, white balance, color profiles, noise reduction, etc. And processing them takes a lot more time than JPEGs.
At Picturelife (https://picturelife.com/learn, shameless plug, I work there) we support RAWs but the results aren't always perfect. Sometimes the image we produce appears too dark and sometimes the white balance is slightly off. Our solution has been to upload both the RAW and JPEG and show you in the interface which is which, with the intention of some day determining which file is edited/properly exposed one and displaying that while still allowing you to download the RAW. While we decided it's better to store all the originals including RAWs despite these difficulties, it's understandable that Everpix didn't.
(Everpix founder here) Everpix will simply sync the JPEGs and ignore the RAWs in your folders, it's all perfectly supported. If you think some of your photos are not synced, the first thing to keep in mind is that our Free plan shows your last 12 months of photos. So older photos won't appear in Everpix. If you still think some photos are missing, please check this KB article: https://support.everpix.com/entries/22207972-Troubleshooting....
The developed versions of RAW photos can be seamlessly synced to Everpix by the Mac Uploader if you use Lightroom or Aperture to manage and develop your RAWs. Support for Lightroom in our Windows Uploader is in the works.
We think this is the best way to sync RAW photos as what really matters with RAW photos is processing them with a very high quality RAW development engine like Lightroom or Aperture have. This also lets you apply the exact development settings and adjustments you want. The result is your beautiful RAW photos developed the way you want and properly displayed in Everpix interface.
A few hours later and it appears it has found my photos, although it seems to keep starting and stopping as if it gets confused. Suppose I am the long pole in the tent for that...
On RAW, given that there are now open source libraries out there, I would like to see them pulled up so that I have the option to keep "everything" in sync. A future direction you might want to consider. In fact, I presume that at some point you may want to incorporate picture editing (directly or through an API) so that folks can load and go with Everpix as part of a full workstream. Perhaps a "Pro" package for folks who want their full portfolio in your cloud.
(Everpix founder here) Not sure why you mean by "it seems to keep starting and stopping as if it gets confused". Please use "Contact Support" from the Uploader menu so we can get to the bottom of this.
This fills a need, I'd say. I currently use a service (smugmug) that does this sort of thing and love the way the everpix interface looks. My primary complaint of most of these sites is speed, so this is worth a look.
I've never understood the aversion to paying for cloud backups. Even with a mirrored NAS and some (probably no longer readable) DVDs I feel like I could easily lose photos. These services are so much easier/cheaper in the long run.
Just had an idea - if so many people get burned by those disappearing saas sites, then perhaps it is time for startups to get some insurance to show themselves more trustworthy? For example, for each year running we will insure running unchanged for another year if we were to fail/get bought, etc. ? That could bring more trust into Saas business and perhaps make it less bitter.
1. Most services get acquired weeks or months after launching (Sparrow, Mailbox), and
2. Those promises are pretty hard to deliver on. If a company fails, who are you going to complain to when they don't keep running as promised? When a company gets acqui-hired and the mothership chooses to kill or freeze the service, they can just change the Terms & Conditions.
It's becoming more and more important to show that you are seriously committed to your product and not just in it for the short-term win (and even then an Instagram can happen), but I'm not sure an insurance would be worth more than an empty promise.
I meant actual insurance, via insurance company. Delivery would be funded via money on the insurance. The insurer would've been obliged to comply with these terms.
Regarding the killing after acquisition - I agree, but these are the cases the insurance would be targeted against. Those without insurance would be clear that they don't care about the user.
I signed up to Everpix a few months ago and haven't looked back - the organisation takes some getting used to, but the support team are very helpful and they seem to be improving it every week. Highly recommended.
Registered, downloaded app, attempted to sync "This folder doesn't appear to be on a Mac disk - Please select a different folder". So, why is it not OK that I keep my pictures on my NAS ?
(Everpix founder here) We are working on it, but it's not ready for prime time yet. From our FAQ [1]:
Everpix Uploaders fully support external drives but currently do not support network drives (aka NAS). Our Mac and Windows Uploaders use some advanced file system features to track photo files and these are typically not available (or not reliable enough) on network drives.
If possible, it is recommended you connect your network drive directly to your computer as an external drive over USB or Firewire.
hey there!
kudos for the simple explanatory, no-sound, no-parse-style-hollywood production videos!
this is one of the examples where autoplay makes a lot of sense, and it's very easy to get a grip of what i can do with your product. Good job!
I feel like I'll pay the money... spend my time syncing my library and getting everything organized... and then someone else is going to snatch you guys up and shut it down.
Clearly you guys have a business model and a product you're selling. If I can't even rely on you guys being in business long-term, what can I do? But you guys have built an amazing product! Keep up the good work!