Everpix transforms overwhelming photo archives into enjoyable memories
There are photo services out there that provide off-site hosting. There are others that add in crazy filters and captioning. Everpix is the only service I've encountered dedicated to automatically taming the way real people take real pictures in today's age of ubiquitous cameras.
It was built to transform overwhelming collections into a merely whelming ones, removing the need for manual organization and making it easier to navigate through what would otherwise be information overload.
Designed from the start for people with large photo collections, Everpix is the brainchild of several ex-Apple employees. Pierre-Olivier Latour, CEO and founder -- and incidentally one of the brains behind Quartz Composer -- talked with me about the site and the product.
"Everpix is our response to a massive real world problem," he explained. "People's photo collections are growing out of control and the tools out there are insufficient as people add more and more photos into their libraries. These tools are unfit from a GUI perspective and a technology perspective, so we're building a replacement. Everpix is designed from the start for large photo collections, and it's based on a lot of hard science and great design."
"You shouldn't have to come back from vacation and then start organizing your photos," he said. "We start from your big mess of pictures and we group that, and understand it, and present it back in a beautiful fast interface."
Everpix incorporates advanced image analysis to understand the actual contents of each picture. "Our science goes way further than every other platform out there. We try to understand what's in the photo so we can detect multiple shots. We know when there are ten shots of a birthday cake, and that they are the same scene. That knowledge about the scene, and about what the collection is about, helps our software understand your photo collection."
Latour states that today's typical user collection may incorporate thousands and thousands of pictures. They typically see an average of twelve thousand pictures for Mac users and maybe eight to ten thousand for Windows users. "Everpix has the required understanding to transform these collections from those thousands down to a way more manageable size. Only a couple of hundred of these matter each year. We help users find them."
The service syncs existing photo libraries, preserving metadata, from iPhoto, from Aperture, from Lightroom, and so forth. "If you want, you can keep your habits, edit in iPhoto, etc.," Latour added, "But we're convinced people will eventually people stop managing their photo collection themselves." The result is a site is targeted towards real world users not photo professionals. It aggregates photos in the cloud and lets people spend time enjoying their photo collections instead of managing them.
Priced at US$5/month or $40/year, the service offers a 30 day free trial for testing. "We want to build a sustainable company," Latour said. "One of the difficult things in the photo space, is trying to monetize a free service. Our users need to be able to trust that we'll be there for some time and that requires a strong business model. So we offer a 30-day free subscription and after that if you like the product, you subscribe. We're serious about building for the future. We're building for life. Your subscription gets you an unlimited number of photos, period."
