Every party I go to in December has one thing in common: every person has a camera – either a clicker or the one on their phone – and is happily shooting away. The next day, my Facebook notifications go haywire with all the photos I’m tagged in, I get emails from people sharing albums of the event on Picasa and Flickr, there are a bunch of Instagram photos of the same night (and usually with a lot of food in that, sigh!), and my dad and his friends stick to good old email attachments.
And the whole point of a service like Everpix really sunk in when this happened: a nifty web app that collates photos from all your different accounts and puts them under one roof. And it even features an app for the iPhone that takes all of its images. Lovely! But does it actually deliver?
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How It Works
I didn’t find Everpix wanting because it has options for most of the major services out there: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Picasa, Flickr, Gmail and other email. Still, I can understand how some people would find these not enough, such as those who use 500px or SkyDrive now.
You can also connect devices like your Mac, iPhone or iPad (Windows and Android options are coming soon) for instant upload of photos stored on them.
Ample options to connect to web services as well as devices.
Once you have hooked up Everpix to your accounts, give it a little time. Everpix analyzes each image before importing it, so the process is slow. I found it best to do the whole procedure at night, then wake up to find it finished.
All Your Photos Are Belong To Us
Once the photos have been imported, they are automatically organized chronologically, showing the current year’s photos first, segregated by month. You can change the year in the toolbar at the top.
This toolbar also plays host to options to let you choose which individual source you want to view pics from at the moment, or if you would prefer the default option of seeing images from all sources.
Pics get arranged by aspect ratio. Albums show the number of photos you have, an option to download them all, or share them
Click any album, or ‘Moments’ as Everpix likes to call them, and you will see all the photos currently in it. The toolbar gives you new options now to see the number of photos in total, and download them all if you want to.
You can also choose to share the photos, or a small collection of them, on Facebook or Twitter, or by creating a Photo Mail or a Photo Page. We’ll get to what those are in a bit.
Each photo, when clicked, hosts a few basic editing options, such as rotating it, editing the date, downloading the photo or deleting it. But know that deleting only takes it out of Everpix, not the original source it has been brought from.
The photo-editing options are very basic
You can also choose to simply hide the photo, such that it doesn’t show up in your albums the next time you are browsing through. Quite a cool feature, this one.
Photo Mail & Photo Page
The ability to share your albums is two-pronged.
The simpler one is Photo Mail, which lets you open up an album, select images from it, and share them as an email with anyone. If that person uses Everpix, they will get additional options to download the full-res images and browse on the web app; otherwise, a preview of the photos in the email is all the recipient gets.
I didn’t appreciate that even though EverPix gets access to my Gmail or Email account to import photos, it doesn’t take into account my contact list. Thus, there’s no easy way to add contacts to the Photo Mail, apart from manually keying them in. A huge failure, this one!
Creating a Photo Page couldn’t be simpler. Just select and share.
Photo Page is meant more for the general public. Again, choose the pictures from an album and Everpix will create a custom URL open to anyone for viewing.
Personally, I thought Everpix could have done a lot more in this aspect. Photo Page only lets you share images from one album. If this part had the ability to let me create a new Photo Page with pictures from different services/albums, it would have been an incredible feature and I would fork over good money for the app instantly. But as it stands, it’s quite limited and well, leaves you feeling like a major feature is missing.
Other Features
Everpix has two other notable features, both in beta testing right now, with one restricted to subscribers only and the other available for iPhone and iPad at the moment:
Similar Photos: Remember we talked about how Everpix takes a long time to fetch all your photos because it analyzes each of them? Well, that analysis pays off here as a new feature, for web subscribers only, promises to find similar photos to any one you choose. Everpix recommends that you have at least 5000 photos for this to work smoothly. We couldn’t test this feature at the time of writing.
Highlights is quite a cool feature, but isn’t the ‘magic’ that Everpix promises.
Highlights: Analyzing images also lets Everpix figure out which are the more important photos to you. “We’re not just talking pixels—think sunsets, friends, and kittens! So when you choose the Highlights view, we show you the essence of your collection, delivering more magic and less noise,” they say. It’s currently on iPhone and iPad, and when we tried it, it worked decently. It’s not the ‘magic’ that they promise, since it did bring up a few images that we wouldn’t give two hoots for, but overall, it did tend to find the better pictures in our collection.
So Is It Worth it?
Everpix offers a free one-month trial period, but after that, you have to pay to use it: $4.99 per month or $40 per year.
As it stands, I honestly don’t think Everpix is great value for money. It has potential, yes, but only if it delivers on some fronts.
For starters, the ability to create a photo page out of different albums would, by itself, be enough reason to pay for the service.
Also, the Similar Photos and Highlights, while cool features, don’t really justify the amount that Everpix asks for.
$40 a year or $4.99 a month is a lot more than I would pay for to get this kind of storage on Google/Picasa or any other cloud storage service; why wouldn’t I just use an app like PixelPipe to import all my photos into that one cloud drive then?