New Year's Resolution Inspiration: Tackling the Photos (Part 2 – ThisLife.com)

If you read my last post (In Defense Of The Blurry Ones), you know that I was recently sucked deep into the belly of a massive photography project and lived to tell the tale.

In 2003 during maternity leave with my first child, I organized a lifetime of photography into albums. Perhaps you know the process: stacks upon stacks of photos and hours of sorting. I’m surprised my marriage (and my firstborn) survived, but at the end of the process I had several decades of our lives neatly organized into leather-bound albums.

Fast forward to 2014: I somehow neglected to revisit the photos again during the subsequent decade, the arrival of another child and the number and speed of photos taken reaching a fever pitch thanks to technology’s advancements. It’s not that I totally neglected our photos, it’s that I hadn’t made a firm decision and married myself to a concrete process.  That, my friends, is the key to photo dominance.

For example, 2004 through parts of 2010 were floating around out on Shutterfly, but I hadn’t accessed them in a couple of years and feared they were gone.  The years 2010 – 2014 were on Dropbox, and then there was a brief stint with Google+ (not to mention hundreds on Instagram and Facebook which I was unsuccessfully trying to catalog with an IFTTT recipe – more on that soon if it’s Greek to you).

Enter ThisLife.com, a stellar service quietly acquired by Shutterfly in 2013.  I stumbled upon it and then quickly found it endorsed by Cool Mom Tech (This Life… is blowing us away) and The Next Web (This Life Masters Photo Management For Busy Families).  A little research and a few articles later, I was 100{cab58b9493bca9eccefbf3ae00ef5a3add1991efca1fb728a890b19984c3cc67} sold.  This is my photo system forever.  (I’m nothing if not intensely loyal.)  Here’s what convinced me:

• Ridiculously simple – and speedy – uploading.
• Handles photos and videos.
• Automatically avoids creating duplicates.
• Facial recognition – quick and simple tagging of family members & VIPs.
• Automatic tagging of multiple photos (i.e. “Camping” or “Christmas”).
• Photos grouped by years (timeline) or location (Paris) (vs manual organizing on other sites).
• Creation of stories (i.e. Paris 2009, Sophie’s Birthdays).
• Joint account allows family members to contribute.
• Receive a text to install multi-platform apps then forward to family members.
• Gathers photos from computers, tablets, smartphones and social media.
• Automatic upload/syncing from devices – install on multiple devices to feed photos to one hub.
• Locations: photos are automatically geotagged, so it’s easy to view specific trips.
• Apps allow browsing of all photos without taking up tons of space on your smartphone/tablet.

Admittedly, you’ll find some of these features or some variation of the above through other tools including Shutterfly itself, but after years of struggling with various photo solutions, I can assure you that I have not found anything as fluid and simple. Here’s a comparison of features for reference.

The free plan allows up to 2,500 photos, and I thought I’d just play around before making a commitment to the full service. Suffice it to say that after years of our life were smoothly and quickly uploaded and catalogued, I was sold.

One long weekend and an upgrade to the $59/year plan (up to 25,000 photos plus a free photo book) later – and worth every penny as well as every moment of supervising the process – I am feeling like the queen bee of preserving family photos.

With ThisLife, I can flip from a 2003 photo of our oldest daughter passed out in the backseat on the way home from the Tulsa zoo to another photo – almost ten years later to the day – of our youngest at the same age having the same moment.

ThisLife is now home to every moment of our family’s life over the past twelve years (ahem: 13,197… and counting…), organized and searchable at the drop of a hat.  We’re celebrating with a big family photo viewing party this weekend, and in the next couple of weeks I’ll have all our old physical photos from pre-2003 scanned and uploaded in as well.

Photography mischief managed. If 2015 is the year you’re determined to go “from photo mess to photo bliss,” you need ThisLife in your life.  You’re welcome!

For more in the Little Magpie photography series, start here.  On a related note: I typically post my over-enthusiastic tirades about technology and apps over on the Magpie Marketing blog. Hop over for more on Evernote, HipChat and my other favorite shiny objects du jour.