Jack Pearce

Everpix is awesome

I use Everpix to backup and organise every photo I’ve ever taken – all 27,159 of them.

Not so long ago I used to take my camera with me everywhere, see my Flickr for proof. Over a few years the number of photos I’d taken started to add up (only a handful ended up on Flickr). The saddest part is that I have easily taken 5x the amount I have today. I can’t remember how but I stumbled across Everpix roughly 6 months ago and I’m fairly gutted I didn’t discover it sooner. Everpix is the answer to so many problems. I own a laptop, I own an iPhone and I own a digital camera. Where possible I want my photos to be automatically synced and stored in the cloud forever, without having to worry about storage limits.

I take photos on my iPhone every single day, only the most recent 1000 photos are synced to iCloud Photo Stream. If I take photos using my DSLR (rare these days) I’ll import those photos into iPhoto – the most recent 1000 photos from iPhoto are uploaded to Photo Stream pushing my iPhone photos out of Photo Stream. If I want to view a photo I’ve taken on my iPhone using my laptop I have to open iPhoto, wait a minute for them to download and import, then view. In 2013 this 1 minute wait isn’t cool. Photo Stream doesn’t have a web interface. With Everpix everything is instantly accessible through your web browser 1** **and you can store an unlimited number of photos. Apple’s idea is that you use iCloud Photo Stream to sync your photos from your iPhone, iPad back to your Mac and then you’ll use Time machine to store a backup from there. Apple also offer 5GB free iCloud backups which I should imagine most people don’t have switched on. Once you hit your 5GB limit (roughly 1700 photos) you can then purchase expensive additional iCloud storage.

Until now my photos were stored in unorganised folders that had accumulated over the years. I used Picasa to sort through it all. Unfortunately most of my photography is lost forever, the good stuff is on Flickr but mostly in scaled down formats. Thinking back I don’t really understand how I’ve managed to lose so many of the originals, I think I have possibly got fed up and installed a clean OS on my machine at the time and thought to myself ‘the good stuff is on Flickr, I don’t need the originals’. Same goes with my iPhone – installed a beta OS and accidentally wiped my photos in the process. Saying that I still have just over 27,000 photos (55GB) that aren’t lost.

Why I love Everpix

  1. No Duplicates. Everpix automatically de-duplicates your whole collection. It does it in a few ways. It makes a note of your file’s checksums to ensure it doesn’t re-upload any photos that are already in your collection. Photos that aren’t exact copies so different size, resolution, Everpix will de-duplicate server-side too so that only the best quality version is visible to you through the web interface and in the apps. The metadata from the copies is saved and listed beside the original so that you know where a photo came from. See it in action
  2. Everything is private by default. Everpix is designed to store all your photos including photos of your privates. By default nothing you upload to Everpix is shared with anyone. Sharing an album of 300 photos is achieved in a few clicks but you have to explicitly tell Everpix you want to share those photos.
  3. Unlimited. You can upload as many photos as you like to Everpix. I’ve even seen stories on twitter of people uploading well over 300,000 photos with no issues. I currently have just over 27,000 photos (with 2,000 duplicates). For free Everpix will store your last 1 years worth of photos, if you want to store more than that you’ll have to upgrade to the paid plan. For the price of a coffee each month it really is worth it.
  4. Sharing lots of photos is easy. When I get back from Holiday I like to round up all my best photos and then share those with my family (not the whole of Facebook). The easiest way to do that was to email lower res versions. With Everpix you can highlight as many photos as you like and send them across in seconds. You have the choice of sending a link to a private page with your photos on, or ‘Everpix mail’ which is basically just an email with that same link in it – if they’ve got an Everpix account the photos will also show up in their web interface or the Everpix app.
  5. Nothing gets deleted. Everpix doesn’t sync your photos, it uploads them and keeps them there forever. If you run out of local storage space and need to make room for more, go for it – your photos will still stay in your Everpix account.

Everpix encourage you to rediscover old photos. This is my favorite feature.  Built into their apps is a feature called ‘Flashback’. This will show you photos that were taken 1 year ago today, 2 years ago today, 3 years ago today etc. The 1 year ago today view always catches me out makes me realise how quickly time passes. I constantly find myself re-discovering classic moments and emailing them off with the subject of ‘This was one year ago!’. Everpix has another feature that encourages rediscovery and this is called Explore; it allows you to return photos based on photo subject. For example ‘Food’ ‘Nature’ ‘City’ ‘People’. Explore is still in it’s early stages and isn’t perfect, sometimes it doesn’t work at all. When it does it’s a fantastic way of looking through your photo collection from all years based on photo subject. Food is particularly interesting, for some reason if I’m about to eat something that looks badass I’ll take a photo of it and then never do anything with that photo, now I can trawl through all those photos re-living those awesome fatty moments.

I like Everpix because I trust it. It’s simple and it works well. You install the desktop client on your laptop and it will upload photos from any source (folders, iPhoto, Aperture) automatically. You install the iPhone app and it will sync all your photos, in the background, automatically. The post processing of your photos is nice but at the moment not the deal breaker. Everpix is what iCloud Photo Stream / iCloud backup should be.

Right now I don’t believe Everpix is designed as a standalone solution for professional photographers. There are three things that would stop a professional photographer from using Everpix.

  1. Doesn’t sync RAWs
  2. Doesn’t sync videos
  3. Compression. Everpix use a proprietary image optimization algorithm, a fancy way of saying they’ll do their absolute best to preserve the quality of your photos at full resolution. They don’t touch the originals, instead make a copy of the original and compress that. Uploads are quicker and for them it saves on storage space requirements. I am not a professional photographer so I don’t have an issue with this and at 100% I can’t tell the difference between an original and an Everpix-original. Picturelife deals with RAWs and videos, might take a look at this soon.

I recently read an article named Regular People Have No Idea How To Manage Photos On Their iPhone and it highlights that regular people really don’t do enough to look after their photos. Let Everpix do it for you and never worry about losing a photo again.

  1. As per Everpix website: Everpix can receive millions of new photos per day, which must then be processed by our very advanced Image Analysis. After this step is done, the automated Everpix views must also be updated. There might therefore be some delay between when a photo is uploaded and it showing up on Everpix.