Tag: Private »

A little over a year ago, everything changed. My daughter, Peregrine (Pip, for short), was born, and along with the myriad recalibrations, adjustments, and joyous changes that birth brought with it, I also finally came to terms with the true value of the iPhone camera: baby pictures! Hundreds and hundreds of them (no exaggeration) were taken by me, by friends, and by family, and then scattered over hard drives, social networks, and of course iPhones. The problem then became figuring out how to organize and store them privately and securely. As a devoted Mac user it’s easy enough to keep photos stored on iPhoto, but that’s a local option only, with limited cloud storage and sharing (those 1,000 photos on iCloud? Please!), and god forbid my hard drive crashes without proper backup.

I thought all of my problems with cloud storage for photos were solved when Everpix came along. Here was a fantastic, well-designed app that also had great web-based software and a Mac-based uploader. Best of all, it could load in all of my photos from various social streams, eliminate or hide duplicates, and handle a potentially unlimited number of photos for a reasonable monthly or yearly price.

There was just one big problem though; Everpix went out of business.

Before I get to the heart of this article, there are a few lessons to learn from my Everpix experience.

One: Always keep all of your photos on a local hard drive.

Two: Backup said hard drive as often as humanly possible (something I still don’t do, so do as I say, not as I do).

Three: Never, ever assume that a site, app, or service will exist forever. It won’t; it just won’t. They will all go away at some point. Some will last five years. Some will last a year or two. Some of the very best won’t even make it that long.

So I found myself back at square one, trying to find another good (read, as close to the effortless Everpix as I could get) cloud-based storage solution for my photos. Read on for my look at nine different cloud storage services that work with iOS.

Shared Photo Streams are great, but they're fairly limited in what you can do with them. Enter PhotoSocial, a new private photo sharing app that aims to put Photo Streams out to pasture.

● Send entire days of photos over text/email instantly via private web link. No login, no download, no hassle - viewable on any smart-phone or desktop. (Your friends do NOT need PhotoSocial to view photos you send.)
● Have friends with PhotoSocial? Send photos directly to their gallery, receive photos back directly into yours.
● Like & comment on photos in private! To use, just pick friends you were with on that day, choose photos to send, and your photos become interactive between just the friends who were there. PhotoSocial brings your gallery to life!
● Uses geo-tag data in your photos to know when you and friends were together, notifies you when you have photos to exchange. (Optional, enabled only with your precise consent.)
● Sharing has never been this easy. Skip other tools that only do half of the job. PhotoSocial is your complete tool for your personal photo collection.

It’s a phrase you’ve only ever heard in the movies or on TV, but now “this message will self destruct in 30 seconds” has become a reality on the iPhone. MEDL Mobile, Inc has released a new app that allows iPhone users to send and receive messages with a preset destruction timer that keeps the contents of your message safe. A message can be set with timer of between five and sixty seconds before its contents are destroyed. Even more covert than simple self-destruction, you can also codename your contacts within the app so their true identity is never revealed when sending or receiving information. The app caters for images, audio and video and also provides a Push notification feature to inform you that a message has arrived.

We’re not exactly sure who needs this level of secrecy on their iPhone and find the passcoded homescreen lock provides adequate security for us. However, if you really want to keep your conversations under wraps and have $2.99 to spare, the app is available to download right now. But we didn’t tell you that, right?