Like most anyone else, I love my photos. They are incredibly valuable to me. Almost every other week, I hear horrible stories about people have lost their phones. The phone can be replaced but, the photos on it can never be. It’s gut wrenching. Even worse, people’s entire library of photos have been lost because their hard drive crashed. This should never happen to anyone.

Nothing puts life into greater perspective than looking at old photos. By looking at an old photo, suddenly, you remember exactly what you were thinking, who you were with, who you haven’t thought about in a while, what was important in your life then, and what’s important in your life now. It makes you a better person and allows you to appreciate life more.

My only regret in life is that I didn’t take more pictures.

In 1994, I had an Apple QuickTake 100, one of the first digital cameras. It was able to take up to 8 photos! You could hook it up to you computer and downloading them only took about 25 minutes. I must have taken hundreds of photos with that camera. The problem is, I have no idea where any of those photos are today.

I always stored all my photos on the hard drives of my personal computers for the past 20 years. Every time I would get a new computer, I would copy all of my files from the old computer to the new, hoping I got everything. Unfortunately, I must have missed a bunch of files, because my oldest digital photo I have today is only 10 years old.

I would give anything to get those old photos back.

In the past 10 years, a few interesting technologies revolutionized photos. The first is photo library organization software like Picasa and iPhoto. This was really great to have quick access and an easy way to organize all your photos. The downside is that all your photos are on one computer. Posting photos publicly was revolutionized by Flickr and made truly excellent by Facebook. However, the idea that I will upload every photo I’ve ever taken to Facebook is unrealistic. Most of my photos are extremely valuable to me, and to no one else. I would never want anyone else to ever see them, but I would never want to lose them.

Simply, I want a service that stores all my digital photos and provides me ways to view and organize them that is just as good as software like iPhoto. Why doesn’t this exist? The world needs this.

So we decided to take the great responsibility of building Picturelife. I guess the only way to predict the future is to build it.

The service would have to back up and store all of a person’s digital photos and video, and provide a beautiful way to view, organize and rediscover those photos wherever they are.

Honestly, that is just the trivial baseline of what Picturelife needs to do.

Outside of technically being able to support any source, any format, any view, any adjustment, or any output, there are some very difficult problems around photos that have not been solved, and many others that have not been attempted.

The most major problem is managing photos in families. It used to be that photos were taken on film. They would be printed at the drugstore. If you wanted to share your photos with family members, you could print copies. Photos were stored in physical albums, and could be viewed by anyone that was around the book. Now, mothers and fathers take pictures of their kids on their mobile phones. What if they want to see each others photos? What do they do? How do they send them to the grandparents? Who has access to them? I’ve heard a hundreds of ways families have hacked together solutions that range from plain not working to extremely frustrating.

This is a problem we will solve.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A collection of pictures is worth billions. Most people don’t understand just how much rich information there is in a set of photos. For example, simply using image analysis to detect the difference between duplicates and similar photos, suggesting ratings automatically for easy filtering, knowing when you go on a vacation and automatically suggesting albums, suggesting to share 4 really great pictures of your kids to your parents.

We want to answer the question, “Wouldn’t it be great if..?” with a feature that makes it happen.

As I’m writing this, I am syncing my latest 64,306th picture. Now that Picturelife supports video, my entire photo library is completely on Picturelife. I can access any pictures on my iPhone, on my iPad or on any computer, and it feels great.

What also feels great, is making Picturelife better every day.

If you feel as strongly about your photos as we do, I would love to hear from you. We want to make Picturelife the best photo service in the world. If you feel so strongly that you want to make an impact on Picturelife, we would love to work with you.

-Charles

The memories of your life are recorded not just by the pictures you take, but also videos. Storing all your personal digital media, keeping it private and safe is our mission, so supporting video has always been at the top of our list.

Getting your video into Picturelife is easy

Picturelife will store your original videos, no matter the length or size, from 10 second video on your iPhone to a 30 minute 1080p video on a digital SLR. You can easily upload your videos to Picturelife on Picturelife for Mac and by drag and dropping video files to Picturelife on the Web. We will be adding support for Windows, iOS, and linked accounts soon.

Watching videos on Picturelife

Videos appear in the web app just as regular pictures do. You can tell its a video by the video icon in the upper right hand corner of the thumbnail. Just double click it, and start watching.

Sharing a video privately with a friend

Sometimes you might want to share a video with just a few friends privately. This is super easy to do. Just click on the video or videos, and click send. Then type in the email of your friends and click send. They will be sent a private link to view the video that only they can see.

Making a video public

If you want to share the video on Twitter or Facebook, just click the video, click info, and press the Facebook or Twitter button. You can also click the link button to create a link to send to your friends.

Pro tip

If you want to see all your videos on Picturelife, just click here, or go to the app, click on search, and type: “media_type:Video” and it will show you all of them.

Find a space big enough to move around in, grab a camera with an adjustable exposure, and take back the night with a fun photo activity!

Setup

Setting up an area for light drawing is easy. All you need is a room big enough to move around in that can be made as dark as possible. We had some light coming in from the rear window that we decided to use as a natural frame. We used a Sony NEX-5N set up on an endtable to get these shots. As for the lights themselves, we used finger flashlights that we bought for about $5 at a local novelty store. We also had a toy camera flash lying around. It cost about 20 bucks and runs on a single AA battery. Realistically, just about any old light you have lying around can be used to varying effect.

Shooting

We first started out with basic shapes to get a hang of how much we could draw in the allotted time frame.

Then we expanded our drawings along with our exposure times. Here’s a 15-second exposure.

As we took more time to draw, we could escape the simplicity of our earlier drawings for some really broad motions. Here’s a 30-second shot:

To illuminate ourselves, we tried a few seconds of a smart phone’s light, but it wasn’t bright or focused enough.

This was when we realized we could use a flash to maximize the light on our subject without overpowering the finger flash lights, culminating in a few really dramatic shots like this one.

Are you a light drawing master? Share your best photos with us for a chance to win 10GB free Picturelife storage! Have fun!

Great news! The new Picturelife app for Android lets you back up every photo on your device, safely and easily. Simply link your Android device to your Picturelife account and every photo you take will be automatically stored on Picturelife for secure, private access anywhere in the world.

Stop worrying about losing all your photos to a stolen or damaged phone. Once pictures are uploaded to the Picturelife cloud, they can be easily shared with Family and Friends, stored for private viewing in our gorgeous web application, or accessed from a different computer, tablet or smartphone. Better still, once your photos are backed up, you can free up precious space on your device to use for music, games or other apps. Start backing up and sharing your pictures today.

We’re pleased to announce that Picturelife now offers photo editing and effects. In addition to being the safest picture backup service available, our users now have the ability to edit their favorite pictures and add photo filters with the click of a button.

We’ve added the option to rotate your pictures as well as a 1-touch photo enhancement button to make sure your pictures come out looking fantastic every time. When you’re done editing, simply save a copy to your collection. Or, if you’d prefer, share it with your Friends and Family or send it to your Facebook or Twitter account.

Edited using Picturelife’s Dakota filter

This is just one of many features coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks and months, and we hope you’re as excited to use them as we are to build them.

Just by using every part of Picturelife, you’ll have plenty of extra space to safely and securely backup your favorite pictures from your computer, mobile device or social sites. 

Once you’ve signed up for Picturelife, the fastest way to get more storage is to simply upgrade your plan from Free to Premium or Premium Plus and you’ll be able to store up to a whopping 100,000 pictures safely and securely. Of course, if you’d like to go the free route, we’ve got a number of ways for you to do that as well, outlined below.

Download our apps

When you sign up for the service, simply download the Desktop App to get an additional 100MB of storage. Adding the mobile app to your iOS or Android app will give you an additional 100MB as well. Just using the Syncer will give you another 100MB.

Send and Share

Sending photos to friends through the Picturelife service is good for up to 1GB, and better still, for every friend who follows your pictures back to the site and signs up, you get 500MB of free storage, up to 32 friends for 16GB!

Backup your Social feeds

When you connect Facebook to your Picturelife account and allow imports, you’ll get an additional 200MB. The same goes for linking your twitter account. If someone follows your twitter or public photo back to Picturelife and creates an account, you’ll get an additional 250MB of free storage, up to 10 friends for 2.5 GB!

Use your Picturelife account

All you have to do is play around with some of Picturelife’s features to get free storage. Create an Album, add friends, add a caption, comment on a picture or star rate a photo, and search and guess what? You’re now 1.3GB up from where you were before you used the service.

So you see, with just a little bit of effort, you can push your initial 5GB free plan to over 25GB—all of which will help you get the most out of our great service. Give it a try and let us know what you think!