Picturelife

» see picturelife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By the time Picturelife launched, my photos already lived somewhere. On a hard drive, or in the Google folders you never reorganize. That is the quiet problem Picturelife walked into: it built a genuinely good answer to a question most people felt they had already answered badly enough to live with.

It was a New York startup, founded in 2011 by Nate Westheimer with money and help from Charles Forman, the man behind OMGPOP. It came out of stealth in March 2013 with a real pitch: point it at your phone and your desktop, and it would quietly pull every photo into one cloud and let you find any of it from anywhere. For a certain kind of person with twenty thousand unsorted images, this was close to a dream.

The trouble arrived from above. Google and Apple decided that photo storage should be a free feature of owning their hardware, not a product you paid a small startup for. In January 2015 Picturelife sold itself to StreamNation, a French cloud company, and the runway got shorter instead of longer. On August 22, 2016 it closed. Its two hundred million photos were moved, free of charge, to SmugMug, and its co-founder gave the epitaph without meaning to: nobody is interested in cloud storage anymore.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually ended ~

There is a mercy in the Picturelife ending that most dead apps do not get. When it closed, nobody lost their pictures. SmugMug took all two hundred million of them and let people download everything for free. Compare that to Everpix, which died in 2013 telling users to grab their photos before the servers went dark. Picturelife at least turned off the lights slowly and left the door unlocked.

~ the distance ~

From Ankara this was all weather happening over a different city. I read about the American photo-storage wars the way you read about a stranger's house catching fire in the next town: real, but not mine. My photos were on drives and, eventually, in the same free Google account everyone else defaulted to, which is exactly the account that killed Picturelife. I was, without ever installing it, part of the reason it did not make it.

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