I've been looking for a long time for a way to keep all our digital family memories organized and searchable. I have video and photos on my iPhone, more videos on my Flip, photos shared with me on Facebook and Flickr and Instagram and the regular old photos in my iPhoto library. How do you keep it all organized and accessible?
The new web service ThisLife offers to help you, and we're intrigued by the concept. Their uploader imports your photos and videos from your desktop, your phone, your camera(s), and social websites. With facial recognition, all photos are organized by person as well as place and activity; we assume you must manually tag your photos with place and activity unless they've developed something really groundbreaking (and creepy?). Then, you can search by all these fields, so if you are looking for a photo of Wellington riding his polo pony at the country club, you can specify all these search terms.
With a mobile app, you can also carry all these memories with you and search on the spot. Which would have helped me the myriad times I've told someone, "Oh, I think I have a photo of the dog when he was a puppy on here somewhere..."
ThisLife seems very intriguing, although they are currently in beta and are sending out invitations slowly. So we're wondering how you, our readers, keep the records of moments in your life catalogued. Do you have a good system? Are you interested in ThisLife? Let us know in the comments.
More Info: ThisLife
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(Image: 1. Shutterstock, 2. ThisLife)
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I use Phanfare; I've been really happy with it. It's quite easy to use to upload and organize your photos; you can import photos from most any mobile device, and you can use their web version on a computer or install their software.
It sounds great, but facial recognition apps always seem a bit too good to be true. I'd be willing to test it out, but I can't get behind this one with full confidence just yet
I was JUST saying how Shutterfly needs a "tag" option (like on Facebook), so we can search our fam photos by person (or, ala Polyvore, by outfit? Ha)...I'm intrigued by this new website, but all my pics are on SF, so we'll see...
ThisLife sounds great, as long as my photos are kept behind a gate with a password. I don't need the entire world to be able to see my family photos and videos.
Check out Kaptur.com as well. Its great!
Sounds fantastic! The family yearbook post a few weeks ago inspired me to totally organize my photos, it's so nice! I can find any picture almost instantley now! But I've been wondering the best way to keep them online. I've tried Walgreens, shutterfly, snap fish and of course facebook, but I don't think any of them are perfect. I really love that you can upload videos here, currently I put them on youtube for my mom across the country, but it would be so nice to have everything in one place.
Flickr lets you assign levels of security to each photo (so you can limit it to family/friends) and you can also build sets for easy access to, say, a vacation. It's my favorite site.
We do Flickr for relatives because the interface comes in French. It takes videos up to 2 minutes, so we make it work. We export to Blurb once a year. It is work no matter what. I would look at ThisLife, but it would to have a dream UI for me to consider switching.
I've been a ThisLife user for about 3 weeks. It is awesome! Finally, I have all my stuff organized. Highly recommend!
I was an early adopter of ThisLife. Have been using it for months. Love it!
If you really want to be organized share your ThisLife account with your hubby and pull all your family pics info one place! And, for all the uber-organizers out there, try their face tagging. It is magic! It could even tell my boys apart and I am telling that is no small feat!
Thislife is great because you can have all your photos on your iphone and ipad too! And I can pool all my photos together with my husband and not be searching all over our computers for that elusive pic!
So funny. I never heard of ThisLife until Daily Candy wrote about them and now you are writing about them. Time for me to check them out pronto! My photos are a disaster. I totally need this. Am requesting an invite now!
I use AboutOne's online family organizer for my memories. It also allows me to tag photos and videos but does a lot more than that. I can assign them to people in my family, compile them into a monthly newsletter that I can send by email or hard copy, create hard copy memory books, and share through social media. I can upload them directly into my account or email them to my Inbox, so it's really easy to use. I can also share my multimedia files with others - both AboutOne users and people who don't already use it.
tried to check this site out at work and it's labeled as pornography so of course it's blocked. lol
I've been using ThisLife for about a week and I like it, but not enough to pay for it when there are free options out there. I take hundreds of photos a month so I hit the 1000-photo limit of the free account the first day. I've had a Shutterfly share page for years, and have a list of people who get an email every time I upload new content. It may not be the newest or coolest, but so far it's simply the best way I've found to both organize and share photos.