Innovative solution providers tackle the ever-growing headaches of photo management and storage

It’s a given: we are all overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos we take, or that are being shared with us. With some of these, it’s no big deal if you accidentally missed viewing them, or if you can’t locate them again after you’ve first enjoyed them. With others, it does matter: According to our recent survey, 58% of photos on average are considered to be “long life” keepers.

So we want to know on which device or cloud service these important photos reside, and how to find them. As if that weren’t challenging enough, we also want to be able to safely back them up in case something goes wrong with the device on which they most likely reside (read: our phone) or archive them, in case that phone runs out of storage space.

The good news is we’re now seeing innovative vendors of photo app, device, and cloud storage solutions tackling the multiple challenges related to how consumers find and browse the photos that matter to them.

The following is an overview of these solutions, several of which will be demonstrated or discussed at our upcoming Mobile Photo Connect conference, October 24-25 in San Francisco:

We all know consumers want to be able to access their photos from any device, at any time. However, two factors complicate things:

Bottom line: t he average consumer has no idea what’s really going on: which of their photos are stored where, for how long, and at what resolution, and what would happen if their house was indeed destroyed, or their phone stolen.

While consumers increasingly embrace the cloud for photo storage, it’s not a given that they’ll want to rely on cloud storage services for all their photo needs. For instance, in our survey we found that 48% of our respondents who back up the majority of their smartphone photos still do so on in-home storage devices (40% do so in-home and in the cloud). In addition, we’re witnessing a resurgence of innovative in-home photo storage solutions. For instance, Kwilt, a developer known for its photo management solution that allows users to browse their photos on various cloud services, just announced their Kwilt Shoebox appliance. SanDisk not only provides its portable iXpand flash drives, it now also offers the iXpand Base (for more on both, see below).

Having unified access to your photos through a cloud or in-home solution is one thing, being able to find the photos that really matter when you need them is quite another. We’ve seen solutions progressing from leveraging metadata to using AI for auto-tagging of objects or people. The next battlefield is auto-curation of consumers’ “best” photos, however “best” is defined. At Mobile Photo Connect we’ll have several startups show or discuss their auto-curation solutions, including EyeEm in our AI is Ready for Primetime panel.