Tag Archives: Google

Is there Life after Everpix for Online Photo Management?

Over the past year or so I’ve been using an online service called Everpix to automatically store every picture taken on all our iOS devices, automatically synchronise pictures from the iPhoto libraries on both our iMac and MacBook, and automatically suck in and keep updated all the pictures I had on a variety of other services such as Flickr, Instagram and Facebook. Having pulled all these pictures in it did a really nice job of detecting duplicate pictures highlighting when the same picture was on multiple sites, and allowed me to browse through all the thousands of digital pictures I’d built up over the years. Daily it would send an e-mail highlighting old pictures taken on that day in previous years. They had a free service that stored only your most recent pictures, but for a reasonable $5 monthly charge they stored unlimited pictures.

However it wasn’t to last – last month Everpix announced their closure, as they weren’t going to be able to pay their hosting bill. If you have a read of this article about the closure in The Verge you can easily understand why – whilst they were paying to host loads of pictures for the free service, not enough of those had converted into paying customers. So I, like other Everpix users started the search for an alternative.

After a bit of a look around it seemed like there were plenty of options. Services like Dropbox and Google+ offer photo storage as part of their offering, and of course there are the specialist photo hosting sites such as Flickr, SmugMug and the rest that can store pictures. There are also services very similar to the Everpix offering such as PictureLife, ThisLife, MyShoebox and Loom with a variety of similar features but various pricing models. The arena is also starting to attract the interest of the big boys, with Adobe having retired their previous online hosting and sharing service in favour of  which is supported by the latest versions of Photoshop and Premier Elements, alongside a suite of other Adobe applications.

First though, if you’re just looking for a secure way to backup your pictures and nothing else, I wouldn’t waste time and money on any of these, just make use of one of the many online backup services and just backup the whole computer. Personally I’ve been using the excellent Backblaze for a while, which has a dead simple per computer pricing model so for $3.96 per computer per month I have a complete copy in the cloud. It operates much like Time Machine on MacOS X, and software like Acronis TrueImage on the PC in that you can set it up and forget about it. It continuously backs up your computer to the cloud, fully automatically and without any need of intervention. Basically the only time you need access it is if you need to restore a file. If backing up your pictures is all you’re worried about, stop reading now and head over to Backblaze! If your house gets hit by lightning and it scrambles all the electronics in your house, as happened to a friend of ours recently, having an off-site backup like Backblaze is worth the small monthly outlay.

Anyway, if you’re still reading, you’re probably looking for something more than just a straight backup.

Looking at all the services I had a bit of a list of important points to consider before spending the large amount of time uploading all my pictures to the service, the main points included (in no particular order):

  • Ease of uploading both from mobile devices and computers
  • Cost of the service – what is the monthly cost going to be now and how much will it go up as the number of pictures grow
  • How does it handle duplicates – this is especially important if you are paying for space as a lousy deduplication algorithm will leave you paying twice for the same picture.
  • Long term service viability – is this a small startup for which this their only product or part of a bigger offering from a large company.
  • Other bells and whistles – are there any additional features that are attractive.

When considering all of this, this is for our combined photo and video library which runs to over 30,000 pictures and videos stretching back over a decade, size wise running to over 250Gb of data.

Starting with Dropbox and Google+ whilst the iOS apps work pretty well sucking every picture off, there is no real desktop integration with iPhoto for example, and both have significant limits – Google+ to 15Gb, whilst Dropbox is limited to 3Gb unless you put down $10 a month to lift that limit to 100Gb. Flickr and SmugMug are possibilities, Flickr especially now it offers 1Tb of space for free, however they are very clearly designed to be used as sites to present your best images, not as general storage for a large photo collection, so in particular neither offer the set up and forget synchronisation with a desktop that Everpix offered. There is also one major concern with Flickr as they have in the past shown a tendency to permanently delete accounts for arbitrary violations of their terms of service, and even when they have admitted they were wrong to do so have been unable to restore  the accounts. If this is going to be a main backup of your photo collection a service that could potentially do that is not particularly attractive!

Looking at the services that are more similar to Everpix, over the past month I’ve had trial accounts with all four, and even paid out for a month to give PictureLife and ThisLife a good workout. The big fly in the ointment for PictureLifeThisLife and Loom straight off is the price. I don’t for a moment blame them, but for a collection the size of ours the storage cost mounts pretty quickly. This is made worse by the services having duplicate detection that is not nearly so good as their promotion might suggest. A big problem is to do with the way iPhoto deals with exports in that it rarely if ever exports the original image. Even if you load a picture from your iPhone into iPhoto and export it immediately to Flickr, iPhoto will re-encode the picture, so at times I was getting three, even four versions of a picture once edits and other uploads had been taken into account. For any service where you’re paying for space this is an expensive issue!

In terms of features PictureLifeThisLife and Loom are pretty good. PictureLife will even suck in your albums from iPhoto (although it fails to detect when those albums have been uploaded to Flickr which results in loads of duplicate albums), and ThisLife has a really excellent facial recognition system that once trained does a pretty good job at working out who is in a particular picture. Another really nice unique feature with ThisLife is the joint account feature that allowed us to pull together pictures from all sorts of different sources. Ultimately though with the numbers of pictures we have, the killer with all three of those services is the monthly cost, which is only going to go up. However nice the services are the poor deduplication coupled with the monthly outlay for a non-essential service means they weren’t my long term choice.

I’ve deliberately separated out MyShoebox (not to be confused with Shoebox from Ancestry), because unlike the others it is following a more Everpix like pricing model. The main difference is that rather than limiting the time period that can be uploaded for the free account it degrades the resolution. Like Everpix it’s another startup, this time running out of Toronto. It’s not as feature rich as PictureLife or ThisLife, in particular lacking any of the linking to third party services online, and lacks a bit of the polish of Everpix, however it does what is says on the tin. I was not overly impressed with the desktop synchronisation client which on the Mac seemed to be a wrapper around a web based uploader and certainly wasn’t as nice as other services. It also pops up a really annoying “are you sure you want to exit” type modal dialog whenever you try and close the website. In terms of special features it includes some nice analysis of the pictures through scanning the metadata. Certainly it scores on price, and will be even more attractive if they improve the desktop synchronisation, but with the Everpix experience, is the pricing sustainable?

That brings me onto the big boys offering, . In terms of longevity, Adobe have been in the game for a very long time, so in terms of a secure bet for a company to do business with they seem a good choice. The pricing is also really attractive. For the first month you can upload as much as you want for free, from then on you can remain on a free account, but you are limited to uploading 50 photos a month, alternatively they have a pro plan for $6 or £4 a month which gives you unlimited uploads. There are no costs for storage, Adobe will basically take as much as you can throw at them. You can upgrade online, but they also offer a subscription option on iOS devices through which you could potentially pay just for a month if for example you were going on a big trip, then drop back to the normal service limited to 50 uploads.

Adobe are coming at this from a slightly different angle, essentially Revel is acting as a central repository for all your pictures and videos. The latest version of Elements Organizer that ships with both Photoshop Elements 12 and Premiere Elements 12 has a background agent that will synchronise your entire Elements Catalog into Revel. If you’re not wanting to buy into the whole Elements ecosystem they do a free Revel app for the Mac, iOS devices and Windows 8 which include limited picture editing features alongside upload and synchronisation features. A number of other Adobe apps such as Photoshop Express, Grouppix and Videobite also hook up to Revel. Revel will also pick up on all the metadata associated with pictures although you’ll need to be using Elements as a Revel client to gain access to a lot of that.

Certainly in terms of the offering, I’ve found Revel the most attractive. Although limited, the apps on iOS and Mac are polished and stable. If you are an Elements user on the Mac, one big gotcha is that the Elements Organizer, being cross platform doesn’t talk directly to the Revel application, so you will definitely end up with two copies of your Revel library locally if you have the option turned on in Revel to store pictures locally as Elements will try and download copies of all your pictures into it’s catalog. However with the subscription option means that you won’t be tied to a monthly cost, which if you don’t pay will result in all your pictures being wiped, and Adobe is a big enough company that they’re not going to collapse in a mountain of debt as a startup might.

After all of that, there really isn’t anything yet that compares to Everpix in terms of what it did and the polish, whilst I’m using Revel to store pictures, it lacks a lot of the connectivity that Everpix had – essentially with Revel you’re getting unity by signing up to the Adobe way of doing things, rather than the way Everpix tries to bring it all together. If you want a lot of the Everpix like features to explore your photo collection, and you either have a limited sized photo collection or money isn’t an issue I’d certainly look at PictureLifeThisLife and Loom, but for any large collection beware of how much it might cost in the long term. Ultimately though if you’re wanting a secure backup of your pictures, get something like Backblaze to keep your data safe, and consider services like this as an added extra, not you only form of backup.

Is government too scared of Google, Amazon and Starbucks?

The tax arrangements of Google, Amazon and Starbucks have been big news recently. Essentially these are big multi-national companies that arrange themselves financially such that they make large amounts of money from British consumers, but pay little or no tax because the profits are transferred out of the country.

Robert Peston, the well known BBC financial journalist published a great post questioning whether our government is scared of these big companies…

If the UK had an industrial strategy over the past 30 years, it could perhaps have been characterised as “foreigners more than welcome”.

To a greater extent than any developed economy, British governments have been almost wholly lacking in concerns when overseas companies set up shop in the UK or bought businesses here – because of the conviction that these overseas companies would bring decent management, useful competition and investment capital to this country.

Against this government policy backdrop, Google, Starbucks and Amazon seem to be examples of huge American companies doing as well or better in the UK than anywhere apart – perhaps – from their home market in the US.

That, at least, would be the case if success is measured in terms of revenues or market share.

Click here to view original web page at www.bbc.co.uk

RIM is a ship heading for the rocks of a breakup

A great quote here from Guardian columnist Charles Arthur about where he thinks RIM, maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry is heading:

Heres what I think: RIM is heading for the breakers yard, as surely as a ship that has reached the end of its life. Within the next 18 months or so, the company is going to be broken up for its useful parts – BlackBerry Messaging, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, its customers. The gravity that is sucking it downwards is now inescapable; to switch metaphors, its a spaceship trying to get out of a black hole, but it hasnt got Scotty aboard.

via RIM is a ship heading for the rocks of a breakup | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

I pretty much agree with his assessment, much like Nokia, RIM failed to see the threat from the Apple iPhone, and then the Google Android phones that followed it, and whilst Blackberry handsets did seem to end up as the cool handset to own for a little bit, they are now struggling to compete in a changed market, much as Nokia is doing. The difference with Nokia however is that RIM have the double whammy of the PlayBook their failed foray into the tablet market created by the launch of the Apple iPad, where quite apart from releasing an incomplete product lacking basic functionality, they also failed to understand what end users wanted. I’m quite sure elements of the Blackberry will survive, but I doubt RIM will exist in it’s current form for very much longer.

Got a Google Places Page for your business? Not any more…

If you’ve got yourself a Google Places page for your business, organisation or group, as we have for the church, you really need to read this article:
Google Places Is Over, Company Makes Google+ The Center Of Gravity For Local SearchSearch Engine Land.

Whilst for a while you’ve been able to add your organisation to Google, now all the existing organisations in Google Places have automatically been moved across. Whilst it makes sense to not have two services for essentially the same thing, Google Places page owners are obviously going to have to give themselves a quick crash course in Google+ to get the best out of it!

Late to the Party – Windows Phone 7 Series

Yesterday afternoon the internet was buzzing with details of the launch of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series in Barcelona. Only it wasn’t really a launch, it was more a demonstration of a preview version of the platform. It’s predecessor was only launched last autumn, and this pretty well complete rewrite of the Microsoft mobile phone platform isn’t going to be available to buy until around the same time this year.

Whilst it certainly seems to have innovative features – a user interface that does things rather differently from the current favoured multiple pages of icon design that is almost ubiquitous, along with an XBox Live tie up to link your mobile and console gaming – it does seem a pretty brave move to show your rivals what you’ve got planned months and months before anything is going to be released. Even when you take into account that Microsoft are often much more open about showing preview releases of upcoming products than Apple for example, it still seems very early to be showing.

However, when you think about it, if Microsoft wants any part of the rapidly growing mobile applications market, it had to do something.

Microsoft, just like Nokia, Sony/Ericsson and all the rest were caught massively on the hop three years ago by the launch of the iPhone. Smart phones were very much of a niche market, and most regular consumers used a phone to make calls. It was possible to add applications onto smart phones, but again it wasn’t something that many people did.

Roll forward three years and the iPhone has really gone mainstream, it still surprises me how many people have them, and who they are. Many of them, even relatively non-technical are comfortable with the idea of adding applications, reading e-mail, browsing the web and playing games from a phone handset. On top of this Google has moved in on the market making waves with it’s Android operating system. Established players like Nokia have found their market share falling after years of failing to ignite the smart phone market.

Then we get to Microsoft.

They had a niche in corporate markets, and certainly I’d come across techies from time to time using (and more often than not cursing) their Windows Mobile handsets. The ability to program applications in the same languages as desktop applications certainly helped adoption. However they largely dropped the ball. Whilst they have carried on releasing updated versions of their platform they’ve largely been left behind, giving the impression – intentionally or not – that they weren’t interested, that they were happy to relinquish their market share to Apple and Google. In the corporate space Blackberry has grown, certainly in our company those users who are issued with a smart phone are issued with a Blackberry, and many of the executives ask for one by name. Any mobile applications would have to be developed for Blackberry, not Windows Mobile now, and Blackberry provide the tools to do that.

As I’ve said, the iPhone seems to have really gone mainstream, introducing a growing range of people to a smart phone, and the techie space seems to be being filled by Google Android. The iPhone is selling by the million, and producing billions of application downloads.

What Microsoft were showing looks interesting, and if they can sort out the reliability and stability problems that established wisdom say plagued previous versions it would be a good platform, but it would be a good platform if the phones were on the market now. Between now and release Apple, Google and the rest will certainly be releasing updated and new versions of their phones and software. The Microsoft gamble is that having seen the show yesterday, people will be willing to wait, and that come the autumn they will be willing to put aside the previous reputation for being buggy, put down their iPhones, Blackberry and Android phones, write off the money they’ve spent on apps for those platforms – or in the corporate environment infrastructure, and switch over to a Microsoft phone. I’m sure there will be a good few techies who will do so, but the average consumer or the corporate user? It remains to be seen.