It happens all of the time. You capture a whole bunch of great pictures while traveling or while attending an event, only to have them get lost into the various albums, galleries and cloud storage apps that you use as backup.
It’s happened to me more often than I care to share…and it’s exhausting!
Thanks to cellphones with increasingly better cameras, the average person takes over 250 pictures a year with their cellphone. With the popularity of selfies, that number is increasing faster than you can get out your extendable selfie-stick. So after some really smart people did the math (source), it turns out that over 1 trillion photos are taken every year. And that doesn’t even take into account video. With the ever-growing number of captured images and videos, it’s no wonder that much of our photos and videos get lost across multiple devices and storage services.
It’s estimated that over 3 trillion photos are stored each year and the expectation is that nearly 5 trillion of photos will be stored annually by 2017. Major digital media and storage companies are scrambling to support the growing need for storage. Amazon offers unlimited storage of photos for $12 a year. Apple gives users 5GB for free and about $12 a year for up to 20GB. Google gives you 15GB for free and 100GB for $24 a year. Dropbox gives you 3GB for free and 1TB of space for $99 a year. All have competing options for casual users to professional photographers. There is, however, still a need to help organize these photos and video.
Indexing and organizing images and videos in an efficient and controlled manner is as important as ever. Companies have begun springing up to specifically solve this problem. The storage companies highlighted above have also started to launch new features to help people organize their memories. From Google to mylio, new products and features are rolling out in attempt to solve for better content organization. However, it has not been easy.
Google launched its new photo service, Google Photos, in May of this year. Aside from some of the cool features like automatic slide shows, insta-gifs and synching with iOS, it included automatic labeling to help better organize and search for images and video. The new features were intended to recognize images, label them and organize them for easy discoverability. The problem is that the algorithm for labeling content has not always been accurate and at times has unintentionally been offensive. In an extreme case, Google labeled people in a photo as ‘Gorillas’, a similar issue Flickr had experienced with their image recognition feature as well. Both companies are taking an active role in fixing the problem…hopefully sooner than later since Google Photos has labeled my kids as “dogs” in a few of my uploaded photos.
Some other interesting services like mylio (http//www.mylio.com), lyve (http://www.mylyve.com/) and tidy (http://tidyalbum.com/) are trying to solve the photo organization problem. All of them are good options. However, they still fall short of providing dynamic content organization or require a lot of user “brute force” to categorize pics.
Eventure is developing a unique platform for capturing, storing, sharing and dynamically organizing photos and videos. The unique social calendar interface, event management features and content directory tied to events allows users to locate memories from their most cherished events and closest friends and family. We look forward to sharing news of the development of these features as we continue to improve the way people connect locally.
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