A worthy replacement for Everpix
Unfortunately my favourite photo service, Everpix, shutdown recently. They kind of mucked up their business model and couldn’t get enough revenue in to keep the lights on. There was plenty of discussion of why they got it wrong, their business model and why Apple didn’t buy them. Anyway, they closed and I stopped getting my favourite daily email with photos from the past.
Fortunately a service called Picturelife has sprung up to fill the void. They spent a long time by the looks of it on sweating the little details as Mathew wrote about recently.
This gives a really nice impression when you install, create an account and start uploading your first pics. It’s then easy to configure a daily or weekly email digest and it seems a little smarter than Everpix in picking out faces to show you. The iPhone / iPad app will also send you a push notification each day if you want but I prefer the email. This is the kind of email I get each day. It’s nice to have a little blast from the past although I really need to tidy up my photos as those little snaps of receipts and the odd screenshot clutter the whole thing up.
There’s lots of other features which i haven’t explored. A lot of them allow you to share photos privately instead of Facebook etc but I’ve not really investigated it yet. I normally print out photos on Photobox and post them to people instead. The web interface is nice and subtle too.
And the downsides? Well apparently it chews up a load of HD space through a cache issue which will hopefully be fixed soon.
Update three: WOAH! Spent a panicked few moments after clicking the above Backup button trying to figure out why my machine was bleeding disk space. I watched 6GB trickle away as Scratch Disk Almost Full message popped up all over the place before a friend (Ta Tim) at 54B helped discover that Picturelife creates a full image cache of your iPhone image library in User/Library/Picturelife/Storage/Images.
That and I don’t like the non-standard buttons. But on the whole it’s a great replacement and their business model seems to have more legs to it – i.e. paid.