There’s this idea that as digital photography progresses, we as photographers won’t have a foolproof way to save and store our images the way that albums and contact sheets saved film. This is why Uconomix Technologies created PhotoKeeper–an online storage platform that is designed to automatically backup your photos without your needing to worry about it all. Its automatic backup feature works with Windows, iOS, Mac and Android devices. And in one convenient spot you can have access to all the backed up photos via a web browser, thumbnail view of all uploaded photos including RAW files. Using their platform, you’ll be able to search through your entire library by EXIF data, date, name, rating, tags and geolocation.
If you’re a brand new photographer, you may not immediately see the value of a service like this but those of us who have been shooting for years will completely get it. How many times has a potential client sent you an inquiry asking about the possibility to license an image and you realize later on that you may have had a body of work that they would have greatly appreciated? It happens more often than we like sometimes, and in a very competitive business, the idea of getting a sale is a very important one. PhotoKeeper’s way of organizing makes this simpler for you. By accessing your entire library from a browser, you can sort through your images and not have to load up hard drive after hard drive. You can also do this from any location–so you don’t need the physical drives when you’re out on location.
When you shoot and shoot and shoot, your computer’s hard drives and your external drives fill up. So now that I’m writing this post in 2015, I look back at some of the work that I’ve shot and when I try to find a specific shoot or image, I need to go through hard drive after hard drive. This isn’t a result of bad organization, it’s a result of shooting for so long and having so many archives over the years. The problem becomes even more frustrating when a company messages you wanting to license an image. It might take a couple of hours to find the image on all of my hard drives. When a potential client messages you, you sometimes don’t have such a large open window due to the way that deadlines work with major companies.
Luckily, I keyword very well and I use lots of folders with specific naming conventions that I can remember. I’m positive that other photographers will be able to relate–and PhotoKeeper’s solution promises to make it easier.
As a photographer grows and becomes more experienced, they learn more about metadata, keywording, and naming conventions, among other things. Organization becomes even more important and it raises even higher when you go pro. The fact that PhotoKeeper makes this simpler for you makes it a solution that you’ll value even more. This doesn’t only appeal to photographers though, it also works well for companies. When we at the Phoblographer develop content, we pool our own internal library for images. If we’re writing about food, we try to find food images in our database by keywords or naming conventions. Similarly, we do the same for street photography, portraits, landscapes, etc.
What should make Photokeeper even more attractive is the fact that the backup implementation is automatic. It will save loads and loads of images for you without you needing to worry in the same way that Google Photos and iCloud do. Those platforms won’t work so well for keywording, search and organization as PhotoKeeper can though. What PhotoKeeper does is when it uploads your photos to their cloud it reads your keywords and ratings and allows you to search based on that. The way you can filter and find photos in Lightroom or Mylio on your computer, with PhotoKeeper you can do so in the cloud. This is a platform aimed at the serious photographer that wants to enjoy the convenience of all their images in one place and can further justify the need to themselves.
Even better: it’s a great way to show a client even more of your work. If you go to meet a couple as a wedding photographer and only bring a couple of weddings with you on an iPad, you can instantly show them more from your PhotoKeeper account. This gets even better when you consider the service’s dynamic album feature which creates an album from photos based on a filter. So you can create a dynamic album based on certain keyword or specific rating and whenever you tag photos with those keywords or apply that rating they will automatically be added to the album which you can use as your portfolio.
PhotoKeeper is different from generic cloud backup services like Dropbox, iDrive and online gallery services like SmugMug and Zenfolio. While general purpose backup solutions backup everything they arenât useful for photographers due to their limited filtering options. Online gallery services are great but they are not meant for storage. You have to upload photos manually and they also do not store your RAW files.
Since PhotoKeeper is meant to back up RAW files which are getting only bigger with time, it offers ample storage space. Basic Starter plan starts with 200GB of storage and costs $3.99/month, midlevel Premium plan offers 500 GB of storage for $6.99/month and the top-level Ultimate plan comes with a full Terabyte of storage for $11.99/month. If you prepay for entire year for only pay for 10 months and get 2 months free. All plans have one month free trial period.
You can find out more about PhotoKeeper at www.photokeeper.net.
Editor’s Note: This blog post is sponsored by PhotoKeeper.
