My current first world problem relates to photo overload, as I bet some of you can relate to.
Taking photos is rad. Sorting through and deleting the chaff, not so much.
It’s also a pain to backup and store photos. I don’t know about you, but my photo life is scattered across different platforms. Facebook is for people photos. Tumblr for more experimental shots. Instagram is for off-the-cuff snaps, usually of food.
I designated Labour Weekend the weekend of photos. Hi-res images are the nemesis of loading times and space online. But I’m creating a Moleskine photo book, which I plan to use as our wedding guest book, and importing photos from Facebook just wasn’t working – they were all too low-res. I had to track down the old original files. And I took the opportunity to comb through old folders (which I’m glad I did – I found a few more pictures of us as a couple, which I didn’t realize I had) as well as digitise old prints. Believe it or not, at the time of our high school ball, film was still the thing.
Until recently, I used Dropbox to back up my photos, but as I started taking more and more digital pictures, that quickly became impractical. (I also back them up on a hard drive.) But I stumbled across Snapjoy via a link on Twitter – though I didn’t take note of whose link it was, sorry – and I think it may just be the answer to my woes.
It describes itself this way: Snapjoy reunites all of your photos — whether they’re spread across the Internet, locked away on an external hard drive, or still living on a memory card. Basically, Snapjoy acts as a private repository for all your photos. Though if you want to, you can make them publicly visible and attach Creative Commons licences to them. (I guess with Yahoo decisively stifling Flickr, there was room for disruption there.)
You can import pictures from Flickr or Picasa, or upload them from your computer. (It actually freaked me out just how many of my photos were already on Picasa. Either I’d done an upload much more recently than I remembered, or there was some kind of auto backup thing going there.) And the most epic feature IMO is the linkage to Tumblr and Instagram. As I said above, I don’t take ‘important’ pictures on Instagram, but having those in there as well just creates an even fuller record of your life. (Can you tell I’m a Gen Y 2.0 narcissist? I swear, though, you wouldn’t be able to tell in person.)
Snapjoy’s dashboard page throws up a huge carousel with random images, as well as widgets for latest uploads, older images (‘remember this?’) and a lovely timeline box. Click into the timeline, and you’ll see your life in photos arranged by year – though oddly, photos from one particular photo session back in 2009 or so come up as being from 2027. Within each year you can dive deeper into the reels for each month. It’s all pretty slick, and should you wish to tweet, email or Facebook a particular photo, you can do so right from Snapjoy. And the latest feature, according to their blog, is integration with other accounts. Say a friend shares photos with you. You can then copy those photos into your own timeline. Dovetailing FTW!
Photos are precious, after all. Photos alone would make it very hard for me to disconnect from Facebook entirely.
How do you store and back up your photos? Anyone else using Snapjoy?
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