Everpix
everpix.com
everpix.com
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!
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.
Looks like a good service, wish they had a clearer privacy policy and some guarantees.
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?
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.
[1] https://www.everpix.com/legal/terms.html
[2] https://support.everpix.com/entries/23173576-Giving-copies-o...
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?
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 ;)
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!
- REALLY needs an Android uploader
- 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.
Solve those two things, and take my money!
BTW the onboarding user journey is first rate, as is the creative and design work - great job.
Update: Reference: http://superuser.com/questions/128120/are-there-any-good-sou...
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.
Edit: I was at landing_video_highlights.html
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.
In the meantime, photos can be downloaded in full-res and with all metadata of course by "sets" from various places in the web UI.
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.
Everpix is useless. Not only does it not handle RAW, it can't find pictures in libraries not in default locations.
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.
*note: a random number out of frustration. They have one(native app) in works since 2-3 years it seems.
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.
Crashplan ain't pretty, but that's not my top priority in a backup system.
Another option is CrashPlan. Been using it. You can have Glacier with CrashPlan too. It's that cheap.
How many GBs/TBs?
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.
Feel free to reach out to support_at_everpix.com if you think something is amiss.
[1] https://support.everpix.com/entries/22001287-Understanding-E...
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.
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.
"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.
Good luck!
Just put it in.
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.
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).
[1] https://support.everpix.com/entries/22115007-Learn-More-Gett... [2] https://support.everpix.com/entries/22243387-Learn-More-Gett...
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.
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.
Thoughts?
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.
Thanks for the explanation.
I haven't found anything in Everpix that I couldn't have gotten out of iPhoto... :(
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 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 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)...
With that in mind, the subscription model makes sense.
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.
WRT to RAW support, I'm copy-pasting from our FAQ at https://support.everpix.com/entries/21783022-Frequently-Aske...:
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.
Hope this helps :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://support.everpix.com/entries/21783022-Frequently-Aske...