Flickr’s Uploadr (Beta) …another photo vacuum cleaner?

Earlier last week I might have been a bit hasty expressing disappointment at the new standalone uploadr (because I could not log in) the next day I couldn’t wait and tried again with success this time. I wasn’t aware of the 1 terabyte free storage (that’s a lot by the way) being offered. However it didn’t take me long to figure out the new desktop app was much the same as google’s autoback, its just a photo vacuum cleaner, sucking up any images on your computer is a number of default directories (including dropbox) and with no opportunity to tag or cull the collection as it disappears into the cloud, The one consolation is the pictures are loaded as private so they won’t flood your photostream but they will flood your camera roll. Perhaps worst it will create new albums to match each folder it finds. It you upload your photos into directories by date (as most software does, you will have a new camera roll item for that day and a new album to duplicate it!

Unlike google’s autobackup the new uploads are more intelligently filtered (the message I saw suggested it was doing a de-duplicating search, which is good but more importantly tags where automatically added to most photos to identify the type of subject. More surprisingly these seemed to be largely correct (I quickly avoid having my whole collection swept up so I have only uploaded a few photos but I was impressed with the tagging). I can only assume that flickr is using some form of AI image recognition. You can then use this tags to filter your collection (and possibly created new specific albums. It is somewhat reminiscent of everypix. At least it didn’t also try to autoawesome my stuff.

I was intrigued by the picture tagging so I decided to give the uploadr a diverse test Ah it did say Beta.

PS I’ve turned the new beta uploadr off,  and will stick with the previous version which allows manual tagging, choosing sharing options, album and group posting and adding comments at the time of upload.

Not Much Time left to get Your EverPix Photos

For those that where using everpix, the date of it shutdown (15/12/2013) is almost upon us. You should have received at least a couple of emails telling you how to archive and retrieve you photos. However because mine where all indexed to other location (ie my only images on Everpix were thumbnails) I didn’t bother. The process takes a couple of days so if you haven’t done it yet and intend to, TODAY is the DAY!

An Alternative

There was a comment one of my everpix posts, about being able to transfer your photos to Photofeed. So I have taken the opportunity to do that and test out the free version of photofeed at the same time. Photofeed has some useful everpix like features, it has built in duplicate detection, and read multiple resources. It’s sync seems quiet fast (well compared with picturelife) and I got the message that I has more than 1000 photos and needed to upgrade within minutes. I can’t see a lot of organization and ranking tools but it does have albums, and can use embedded metadata. It can store full resolution images (there is a 20MB limit not sure about RAW, there is no help section that I can find at the moment and the FAQs are about signing up) and can, using an app, can automatically backup photo from your phone. So I see it as more a cloud based place to consolidate and store your photos. I’m just using the free 30 day trial, rather the $100/year pro subscription, which gives a three month free bonus.

There is a nice looking android app for your phone, but as it required android version 2.3 or up I couldn’t test it either,

A different take on organizing photos

At the moment I suspect there are two diverging school on what organizing your photo mean. The first group, which is the loudest amongst photo “experts” on the social webs, involve specific “workflows and organization and keywording” as you load your photos, into such packages a photshop, elements and lightroom. Whilst they claim to organised your photos, I see them more as filters that will help you find the classification you have diligently coded into your photos as you load them. Ok this is not the reality for most of us. The real world just has larger and larger sets of photos scattered all over the place. The modern equivalent of a shoebox full of snaps shoots only the shoe box is no longer just in one place. In other words most of us have a mess rather than a collection. I was looking around for a more automated way to sort through a large mess, following the example of everpix that was at least showing the way to classify your photos into different groups from the image itself rather than from keywords you have to add. Picture life was my first review, but its slowness left me looking for more.

When I first downloaded photologhy, I tested it on on about 8,000 photo (picture life has just reached 130 photo scanned) and it was super fast. It creates a thumbnail style view of all your photos, set up as one scrollable collection. However the goodness starts when you use the variety of filters that run down the left hand side of the screen, which can be used to created a search, which is show graphically on the right hand side of the screen. These filters can be combined to narrow down your search. They cover time of day (which I presume comes from the exif details), features (shown below),location (just inside & outside), content (such as sunset, people, beaches …) text (back to search in file name and exif metadata) and color (via a simple colour whee-lish pick list).b It will take no time to get the hang of using it and you can very quickly skrink down what you are looking for. Will you find everything, maybe not but you will very quickly get to the most likely set of images from there it will be easy to review in the scrollable thumbnails.

Once you find the photo or photos you are after you can click on it and go into the photoscreen, which will let you find the photo’s location by clicking on the little folder icon, You also a tool bar along the bottom, which lets you set up new groups (like albums), export the images to files a web site and flickr and Picasa web (all easy to set up). There is a simple print and post the image as you screen wallpaper and even a limited editing capability. Not to forget a trash bin, which deletes the image from disk not just from photology’s index! (I couldn’t find a remove from index option). All these controls are basic but really cover the main tasks you are likely to undertake when you are browsing through your photos.

Well the honeymoon was over when I tried to connect up to my main collection (approx 215,000 photos). The scanning took over the computer and nothing else really got a look in for hours. Then I hit a number of crashes which started about 150.000 photos point. At each crash I was asked me to email the diagnostics which I did and then there was a length rebuilding index step and the program stop. Restart photology would run for a little while before another crash, and so on and so on….  Discouraging to say the least.

The getphotology.com web site is in german and seems more like a blog.even with google translate on. I was not able to find the tutorial section but the layout and controls of the software are pretty simple once you discover that the settings can be assessed under the q at the top right of the screen.

So Photology is only something I can only recommend “as is” and that’s probably just as a glimpse of the concept and its potential, which is promising. However there is a way to go before it can become a useful tool.

Unfortunately Everpix is Shutting Down

I was becoming quiet a fan of the everpix service, particularly the flashbacks which reminded me of the best photos from the same date one, two or three years ago. I actually didn't look at every such email but I did like that momentary refresh of what was going on in the past and particularly checking if did I get any good shots. I also used everpix a few times to get a different organizational view of my photos. It was nicely transparent in what it did. Will I have to find another cloud service that does this, probably not. If anything it makes me glad I’m not putting all my stuff in the clouds.
So what happened? There is more detail available on the everpix site, but the essence is they have not been able secure sufficient funding to properly scale up the business.

“We are heartbroken to discontinue Everpix. It’s a project that is very close to each and every one of us on the team. We cannot be more thankful to all of our customers who supported us over the years. We hope you’ve enjoyed Everpix. We will miss it dearly.”   …. everypix team

Rethinking the Longer Term

rganising you’re your photos is very much about which software you use to manage them, but everpix got me thinking about how you can access a large collection possibly when the current crop of software is out of date, no longer supported or just not compatible with a new operating system. It is very hard to second guess which package gives you a good archive life. The sad reality is you may do better with printed hardcopy than an amorphous mass of digital files (possibly of different formats). There are very real example of the difficulties to come. Do you still have players for your vinyl records, cassette or 9 track tapes, what about the Beta Max or VCR video tape? Can you read that 5 1/2" floppy disc of ZIP cartridge? We are junking our "less visible" storage technologies at a great rate. DVDs, Thumb Drives and External USB drives will probably go the same way.
So How might we best future proof our collection?
My first thoughts are

1. Make your collection more easily searchable
2. Stick to the popular formats
3. Store the originals unaltered (and remove duplicates).
4. Archive only the best of the post processed photos.
5. Understand the need to refresh (and move) your archives

Over the next few weeks I hope to write a few more post on this and related topics

Thanks to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

Some extra thoughts on everpix

When I wrote up the previous post on everpix, it struck me that it might just be the right tool to give me a great way to create an easy to browse “thumbnail” catalogue (visual photo database) of my ever expanding expanding photo collection in two ways.

1. The first was to collect together my various on-line images in one place
2. The second was to tackle my archived collection, which is stored on an external USB

I quickly realised that one database wouldn’t really solve the two issues at once so I split my investigation into two parts. Firstly I tackled the on-line stuff which I have to admit everpix just lapped up, it was probably less than half an hour and I had the email your “collection is ready”. My main net sharng is on either flickr or blogger (and the images are stored in a picasa web album), these were both available along with twitter, gmail, facebook & instagram. I’m not sure if there are plans to be able to connect to other services, like photobucket or smugmug. However don’t get to excited yet everpix only syncs photos photos that are in named albums in picasa web album (or Google+) and defined Photosets in Flickr, not all photos! So far I like the Daily Flashback email, by default everypix sends you a retrospective  of photos you have taken (and in my case published) on that day in history (which may depends on how many bonus months you have if like me you are trying out the service via a free account). Perhaps the novelty could wear out soon. This everpix thumbnail catalogue is by default private, and so it should be, but it is very easy to share any photos you like (for example see my alleyways, gates & windows photo page). I will admit I have had a couple of glitches, like saying photos could not be displayed at the moment but I did opt to you used the WebP thumbnails and I do get a warning every time I log in to everpix.

I ended up adding another free account on a separate computer to tackle the issue of “taming” my private photo archive. In reality I already use and am happy with picasa to manage and view the jpeg versions of my photos, but I like the idea of being able to browse through a large collection, be guided to the highlights and have some smarts behind the scene grouping and refining what I see. The reality of everypix right now is it may promise something like that yet deliver something a little less utopian. I downloaded the Windows App and set it running.

Probably the most obvious problem I have run into is everpix is not fast (in fact it is very slow, after 10 days I have sync less than half my photos from two year (approx 47.000). I’m patient I’ll let it do its magic, I’d prefer slow and steady and low bandwidth needs anyway.

My photo collection is heavily key worded but I suspect the keywords (and possibly most embedded EXIF metadata) is not being included in the current syncing task, because the only grouping I can see are called moments (photos grouped automatically my time). Also all the photos are loaded in the original camera loaded format (see the tilted horizon lines in the screen capture below). This could be an issue for any “non destructive” photo manager.  Unfortunately everpix does not appear to read any of the picasa processing from the picasa.ini file in each folder in my archive. Since the PC version can not read lightroom I don’t know if the same issue applies with files processed with lightroom. Further at the current time everpix only syncs the jpeg format. When you click down to a single photo the extra information about the photo is on a “pull out” style panel on the left hand side and it only has a very limited set of details taken from the EXIF data, and surprisingly only the top directory level/folder so it is difficult to figure out actually where the photo is located. there are a few simple actions/option you can run and the paper aeroplane accesses the share options. I would like to see a bit more information here, like keywords and clickable links, such as to the original photo.

In the meantime I decided to try out Explore, everpix's “image analysis” which promises to group like photos and categories. The topic for PhotoFriday this week was Scenic Wonder.  So I clicked on the landscape and found that every photo had a dean flat horizon, not exactly wonder or even that scenic. Still I like the approach.

I was a little disappointed when I tried out the other categories (eg food shown below) Only two of the images actually included food and then only just, yet there are plenty of class plate shots in my photo collection to choose from. I was given the opportunity to help make everpix smarter by submitting feedback for photo that are not accurately analysed but it took me about 10 rejects before I got another picture of food (a fruit bowl). Still I’m keen to see if this is a “crowd sourced” approach that does actually bring real improvment.

So I think there is much promise here, only for me it falls short of my expectations. I’m still quiet puzzled why there isn’t a slideshow, an embeddable linking system, face recognition, geocoding, formal seach (or find) dialogue box    … ok I have a long list of desirables. Still I think everpix has great potential and for me on a chrome browser the photos where deiplays fast enough and smoothly, better than flickr at the moment. As a different way to collate, keep track and make sense of your on-line photo collection its worth a try now. To bring order to a mass of photos on your computer you will be currently better served but tradition photo management software like picasa or lightroom, and perhaps use everpix as a fun way to change your view.

One thing I did notice was that Michael Herf (one of the co-founders of Picasa) was a key investor in the everpix project and I get the impression that there is a deep respect and passion for photography in the everpix team. I wish then well but they have some work to do.

PS Unfortunately everpix is shutting down

Everpix as “the” meta-collection?

I probably picked the wrong day to start using everpix (well just the free trial), because flickr was down as I was trying to set everpix up and I got taken around a series of connection errors, so I could not figure out if everything was ok of not. That frustration aside everpix is a kind of metacollection, that handles your photos where ever they are on whatever device you want! Ok its not universally magic just yet but is a refreshing move in the right direction for most of us.
Everpix is a great idea, aimed at tackling the great "photo mess" you know all those photos from different devices, posted and stored in different place. As the introduction states " The problem is… the more photos we have, the harder it is to organize them, or sort through that endless mess." Once upon a time they where prints or perhaps negative in shoeboxes. I know you are not inclined to sort through them right now but at least they are largely in one place. In a recent interview on the digital story podcast, the developers commented that most uses start with a collection of about 10,000 images including duplicates scattered around the web. Organising this manually is getting beyond comprehension.
Rather than display everything, it claims to intelligently select the more significant photos as "highlights" and then selecting them will take you into the similar photos. This is not unlike google+ highlights feature and seems to make similar choices. There is also a another feature called flashback, which starts with todays photos and lets you explore your collection for special moments from there. from there. As well as a date classification it shows icons for food, nature, cities and people but these four categories haven't been discover in my collection yet (there is a warning it may take a while)! The collection is also viewable by source. It works a lot smoother than flickr but is similar to the big new seamless mosaic display. . Only now you see what is in flicker, google+ (picasaweb) and on your phone and computer all together. Be patient it can take some time to scan through (sync) your collection, however this is very kind on your bandwidth as you don't have upload the images to yet another location.At the moment they have apps to do the search and syncing for Windows, Mac and IOS devices (Iphone and Ipod), I note the claim that android is coming soon
Under the bonnet everpix does seem to maintain web optimized thumbnails (big enough for current computer screens) on their servers. These are a lot like lightroom’s smart previews and if you are using a chrome or opera browser you can opt to use WebP for a faster performance and significant space saving.
There are two important features that I think will make this popular, because they not adequately addressed by most other web sites and services

1. The default is full privacy, You can share, via a neat little paper aeroplane icon, via email, facebook, or twitter or create a photo page on the web, but you must authorize the sharing. You own and control the images and no metadata is stripped out, syncing and connections are made via https and is encrypted.
2. The system recognizes duplicates, even at different sizes and resolutions and only keep one copy for display, at the highest resolution, but will combine the metadata from all copies and also the link to where they are stored.

If you want to try out everpix, try this link and you will be emailed the details to set up and account. The free trial give you access to the last twelve months of your photos (although it will index older files as well) and you can earn extra time by using the apps, recommending it to others or pay for an unlimited photos in the collection.