We all love to capture those special moments in our lives and keep them so that we can have them to look at later. The problem with this is that now days most people don’t print their pictures and put them in albums — at least I don’t. We tend to keep most of our precious moments on our hard drive, iPhone, DVD or the cloud and they just sit there. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could organize them so that when our children are older we can actually show them these great times?
Well, ThisLife is trying to be that service where you can capture your life in pictures and video, store them, organize and share with the world now or with close friends later. There are a variety of cloud storage services out there for photos, but most of them just let you store them on their servers. With ThisLife, there is so much more to do than just let them collect “dust” in the cloud.
Getting Started
Before you start to use the app, you need to sign up for an account on their website. The main premise of ThisLife is to upload your photos and videos to their cloud storage and organize them so that they can be shared with others. So when you start to use it on the iPhone, you are going to want to get your media on there so that you can utilize the service. Unfortunately, you need to already have taken a picture or video before you open the app as they don’t let you do that within the app.
Adding pics on ThisLife
Organizing and Sharing
After you have added your media to the app, you can now start to organize them so that you can share those moments with others. When you add anything into the app, they get sent to the Library where you can do a variety of things. The date stamp of the picture automatically gets imported into ThisLife so you don’t have to worry about remembering when the picture was taken, and you can also change the date if need be. They can also be shared out to a handful of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or emailed to people.
Sharing Options
There is one other feature when it comes to organizing your photos. There is a “heart” button for each picture or video that you have in your library. When you press it, it adds that picture or movie to your timeline, which is a different view where you get to see all the things that you hearted. This is a great way to see all of the important or special times in your life.
Timeline View
Lastly, there is a search function, where you can look for specific media based on people, activities and/or places. This is a great feature to have if you just want to show your friends pictures of a specific event or person. In order to really use this feature to its potential you are going to have to use the web app, then tag people and fill in your activities and places. At this point you cannot do this on the iPhone app, but hopefully this is a feature they decide to add in the future.
Search Function
Pricing and Other Apps
ThisLife, the iPhone app is free for you to download, but the service itself is not all free. They have three different plans that you can take advantage of, with them ranging from free all the way up to $14.99/month. With the free plan you can store up to 1,000 photos or up to 1 hr of video, which is a good starter package to have to see if you really like the app. From there you have two other packages that increase the photo amount and video time significantly. For the features they have, I believe that have a pretty good price point.
To take advantage of these features you are really going to want to take a look at ThisLife’s other apps that they have to offer. The main one is the web service where you can do a lot more than it’s iPhone counterpart. There is a Mac uploader for you to upload your media as well as an iPad app, which has similar features to the iPhone.
Conclusion
After using ThisLife, I have to say that I really like the service as a whole and haven’t seen anything like it. The iPhone app could definitely use some work though, and I think there are some cool things on the horizon. I got a few minutes with the co-founder on Twitter and she mentioned to me that the iPhone app is a generation behind the web service and that they were hard at work on adding more features. I would love to see the ability to tag people, add a location and details about the picture. It would also be nice to be able to take a picture or video from within the app instead of just importing them from your photo library.
If you are looking for a service to store, organize and share out your photos and videos, you need to definitely check out ThisLife. Right now they are in beta, so you have to go to their website and sign up, but they are getting people in pretty quick. Our lives have so many great memories that we want to save and share, try using ThisLife to create that digital album so that you can share them with friends and family through the years.