There are many ways to back up or share your photos online. You’ll probably have some at Facebook, for instance. Perhaps more at Flickr. Or maybe just a folder at Dropbox or some other cloud storage site, where you can access them from any convenient browser.
Checking out yet another photo management service probably isn’t a task which ranks high on your list of priorities, then. But with Picturelife, at least, it could be worth the effort, because this isn’t just some "me too" site: it’s packed with genuine photo management power.
This starts with a good range of apps, for instance -- Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, each automatically backing up your photos (and videos, if you like) to your Picturelife account.
That’s a good start, but of course you’ll also have images scattered around the web, and so Picturelife can import those, too. The option isn’t exactly obvious (Settings > Networks), but once you’ve found it then you can have the site automatically back up your images from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Google Drive, Picasa, Instagram, Tumblr and more.
Once the pictures have reached the server then they’ll be accessible via the Picturelife web client. Here you can view individual images, rate them, see your pictures or a timeline or a map (if they contain location data), organize them into albums, and more.
If you currently manage your images locally via iPhoto, then good news -- Picturelife understands iPhoto’s library, album and rating schemes, so uploading the pictures won’t mean losing their basic structure.
And there are plenty of sharing options, too. Albums can be private, shared with particular contacts or made entirely public, for instance, while the ability to create Friend and Family streams will automatically keep you updated with media taken by your contacts.
All this functionality does come at a cost. You’ll get 5GB for free, and the paid accounts are relatively expensive: 100GB is $70 a year, for instance, while 300GB can be yours for $150.
Picturelife’s multiple clients, social import features and excellent web management tools all help to put the site ahead of the competition, though, and if you need a better way to manage or share your photos online then it’s definitely worth a try.