Cloudify Your Life Memories with ThisLife

Cloudify Your Life Memories with ThisLife:
If you have kids, you can probably relate to my dilema of the fact that I have a ton of photos of my kid and not a convenient place to store them. There are many options out there, like putting them on an external drive, uploading to the cloud, burning them onto DVD’s. All of these options have good things about them and bad.
One solution that has always intrigued me is cloud storage for photos. The nice part about this solution is that you don’t have to worry about drives breaking or losing DVDs. It also saves you from having to worry about precious hard drive space on your computer. There are a variety of cloud services that you can use and I had the opportunity to test out one called ThisLife for the past couple of weeks. I have to say, I haven’t seen a cloud service like it and I was impressed.

Uploading Pictures and Videos

When you first get signed up for ThisLife, there are a few of ways for you to add pictures and videos to your collection. The app asks you if you want to connect to a variety of services that will then import your pictures from those services. They include the following, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Picasa, Flickr and a few other photo sharing sites. Once you are connected to these sites, you can decide what pictures you want to import over to ThisLife. I love that they have this feature, especially since I have pictures in most of these places, so to be able to select what I wanted to pull into the app was a great idea.

List of services you can connect ThisLife to

Your other options to upload your media are that you can manually add them using the upload feature on the site. They also have a Mac application where you can upload from iPhoto and other devices like your iPhone or iPad. ThisLife also gives you the option to email your photos and vides to your site by giving you a specific address to send them to.

Uploading pics to ThisLife

Organizing and Sharing

After you import all of your pictures and videos that you want either from your computer or from the different services you can connect to, you can now begin to organize and share them. There are two different views to look at your photos on ThisLife, a library view, which has all of your media that you imported sorted by date in a grid style. In this view you can click on a picture and you can add details to it by adding the location, the people, as well as the activity you were doing. Once you are done with this, you can then share it with friends on Facebook, Twitter or by email.

Adding details to pictures and sharing features

Each picture and video has a heart symbol where if you tap on it, it will be added to your Timeline, which is the second view that you can use to see your pictures. This view is a little different in that you now see your pictures that you have selected to be on here in a timeline fashion. This is a cool way to see the important dates in your life or your child’s life. Just like the Library view, you can also add details like location, people, and also share it.

Timeline View

Some of the other features is that you can see all your pictures and videos by location, which is pretty cool, especially if you do a lot of traveling. What is nice is that your media can also be downloaded to your computer in high quality. This is nice because a lot of times, when you upload pictures to cloud services like these, they tend to lose their quality and then when you want to redownload them, they don’t look the same. Their facial recognition feature is also pretty good and is a welcome one to have in the app.

Library View

Pricing

ThisLife starts you off with a free account where you can upload approximately 1000 photos or 1 hr of video. If you need more storage, they have two different packages that you can choose from. There is the Adventure Box, where you can store up to 20,000 photos or 10 hrs of video for $80 a year and then there is the Family Box where you can store up to 50,000 photos or 25 hrs of video for $150 a year. I honestly don’t have much to compare it to, but these seem like pretty decent pricing for the features you get.

Pricing

Conclusion

After getting to play with ThisLife for a couple of weeks, I have to say I came away very impressed by the feature set. There are a variety of features that you can use within the app that make it really useful as you are storing, organizing and sharing your media. The nice thing about this is that you can use it for a couple of different reasons. It can be used as a place to just store photos and videos or it can also be used as a homepage for your memories that you can share with others. On the flipside, I did find that maximizing your experience by using all the features was not very intuitive. It definitely was one of those apps where you have to play around a bit and read about how to do things in order to get the full experience.
Overall, my experience with ThisLife was good and I plan to keep using it as my go to cloud storage for my photos. They have a pretty generous free plan where you can really get the look and feel on whether or not this will work for you. Right now they are currently in beta, but if you go over to their site and sign up, you should be able to get in pretty quick. When I signed up a few weeks ago, I was able to get in within 24 hrs. If you are looking for a site where you can not only store your photos, but you want to do more with them, this app is definitely worth checking out.