Today Everalbum has launched a feature that uses machine learning to surface photos around the important moments of your life. Everalbum Explore, available on both the company’s iOS and Android apps, aggregates results from beyond your camera roll, including cloud-based services like Dropbox, Google Photos, Instagram, Facebook, iMessage, Flickr, and Amazon.
Created by former TokBox employees Andrew Dudum and Don Holly, on the surface Everalbum may seem to be just another service that backs up your camera roll, such as Flickr, Dropbox, and Google Photos. But it does quite a bit more, including funneling those images into albums based on events, sharing albums and photos with friends and family, and consolidating into a single place photos that were scattered across the Internet. And with nearly 1 billion photos backed up, Everalbum has gathered quite a bit of information.
That’s where Everalbum Explore hopes to be useful — it wants to help you parse your backed-up photos to find the most relevant ones without you having to manually tag or search. To start, this feature looks at five categories: holidays, friends, landmarks, places, and fun. The company said that these were the “most photographed categories that are also the most emotionally resonant, based on the photos our users have stored and organized with us.”
In testing out the feature, I found that Everalbum’s machine learning and image recognition technology was pretty accurate for the most part. It was able to isolate specific images from across 20,000 photos I’ve backed up to tell me which ones were taken around AT&T Park, the Computer History Museum, Levi’s Stadium, Oracle Arena, and the Space Needle in Seattle. It also sorted them by holiday, showing me those taken around St. Patrick’s Day, Labor Day, and Halloween. Lastly, it parsed through to show me those that are sketches, photos of whiteboards, documents, and screenshots.
These categories are set by Everalbum, and there’s no plan right now to allow users to create their own. “We know that most mainstream users are not interested in searching, tinkering with thousands of photos they’ve stowed away in so many different services,” said company cofounder Andrew Dudum. “There isn’t even a fair understanding of what the ‘cloud’ storage services means to the mainstream users. Our research clearly indicated that users just want to be delighted with their precious moments that they get to sit back, rediscover, and experience, especially at the right time.”
Everalbum isn’t the first one to automatically sort your photos for you, as Google Photos also has this capability, and other services will likely add the capability to do so. However, Everalbum’s ability to pull from 10 sources gives it greater reach, thereby permitting you to have a real digital album of your life.
“Our data shows that these five categories are the most common, highly photographed moments that people around the world take photos around,” Dudum remarked. “Over time, we’ll be using more signals to help us surface far more interesting collections of photos that’s unique to every user and surfaced back to them at the right time.”
The company considers Everalbum Explore a platform and says that it will “continue to get smarter, more dynamic, and more relevant in helping you appreciate your fondest memories every single day.” More categories are in the works, but Everalbum declined to share specific timing.
You can test out this feature on Everalbum’s iOS and Android app today.
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