Everpix is an online photo storage system that’s trying very hard to be the Flickr that everybody wants. Its latest crack at an “Explore” feature uses image analysis to sort all of the photos in your collection into content categories, like “animals”, “city” and “nature”. It works, and it will only get smarter over time.
First a little background: Everpix has been around for a few years, but nobody knows about it yet, even though it’s a very good online locker for photos. Rather than bombard you with disjointed features like Flickr or your traditional local storage programs (iPhoto, Aperture), it opts for simplicity.
After adding your Flickr, Instagram, Facebook and other social networking accounts, Everpix imports them. It then churns them using proprietary image analysis to make browsing your photos easier by showing you the most important photos from a particular batch. (You can also upload whatever you want.) If you took 10 photos on Saturday night, Everpix will show you the representative photo you would choose.
The idea is that you don’t need to go through and do this all yourself. But more than the sorting, what’s different is Everpix’s speedy interface. Browsing my personal collection of thousands of photos taken over the last eight years is so fast and easy that it makes Flickr just feel dumb. Imagine scrolling through Facebook’s photo albums except it’s every photo you’ve ever taken, and Facebook doesn’t own it.
The main problem is that if you want to add more metadata to your collection, you can’t, really. The new Explore feature, which sorts photos for you is supposed to help with this. Unfortunately, the contextual analysis isn’t all the way there yet. It finds people and nature well (above), but, uh, the inside guts of my old QSC Series One power amplifier isn’t “animals”. I mean, it’s an animal, but you know, not my pet rabbit:
In short, Everpix is fast and all of the rich tagging and sorting experiences you’re used to on other services aren’t there. Yes, with more data and development, Everpix will get smarter. But more than that what you’re getting is the satisfaction of browsing your collection quickly online. The full-featured service with unlimited storage costs $US40 per year, which is pretty reasonable considering what a service like Dropbox costs.