ThisLife is a new(ly resurrected) online photo-storage service from Shutterfly, the photo-book-printing people. It’s similar to other services like Picturelife and the now-dead Everpix, letting you pull in your photos from other popular photo sites like Flickr and Instagram. But it comes with one unique feature: face recognition.
First off, the web interface is one of the nicest yet. It organized your photos by day, month or year in a horizontal timeline, with the count of pictures contained in a particular day shown as a label on the thumbnail. Panoramas are supported, and when you view your photos you can share them, comment on them or view basic EXIF metadata. You can even add an “audio note” to the picture (requires Flash!).
Albums in this case are called “stories” and can easily be made and shared from any view in the browser (you can add images to a story from the photo view, or just by clicking thumbnails). You can also tag images, and view photos by location.
Speaking of tags, ThisLife will import any face tags you have from iPhoto or Facebook, and let you tag your own. It will recognize faces in pictures and invite you to tag them manually, too, or you can go commando and click a face manually and add the tag from there. I haven’t yet tagged enough to see if it’ll auto-tag folks by itself.
The other unique feature is a shared account, which lets you and a spouse, family member or weirdly-close friend share an account and have their iPhone pictures and social media feed into the same account. This seems creepy to me, but some people would like it I’m sure.
Also neat is the search, which lets you build boolean queries without even knowing it. You can use drop-down pickers to narrow down by person, place and tag. Thus, I could quickly find all pictures of me in Barcelona, tagged “awesome” (which isn’t as helpful as it sounds, as I tag all photos with me in them with the words “awesome” and “rad”).
Right now I’ve hit the limit for my free account, which is 1,000 pictures (I imported all my photos into Flickr at the weekend so trying out new services – and filling them up – is easy), but you can upgrade to $59 per year or $8 per month for 25,000 photos (up to 100GB). And you can stack these: pay double for double the space.
So far I like this app a lot. I’m going to sign up for a month to see how it goes, and I’ll report back. Oh, and one more thing: because ThisLife is owned by Shutterfly, you can gets prints and books of your pictures easily.
Source: ThisLife blog
