The good news about digital photography is that users have a number of ways to take and share moments with each other. But over the course of many years, most users have collected tons of digital photos from a multitude of different sources: digital cameras and smartphones, as well as photos shared by their friends on social networks like Facebook. That’s led to a frustrating collection of media across a wide variety of platforms and devices.
MyShoebox is launching to solve that problem by providing mobile and web apps to aggregate and organize user photos from a number of sources. It also provides unlimited storage for users to backup all of their photos and provide access to them on all the different devices that they care about.
The startup provides native applications for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android phones and tablets, allowing users to simplify their photo collections across those devices. The best part is that it provides cloud storage and access to all their media for free — as long as users don’t mind their photos being downsized to 1024 pixels. Those who want their photos in full-size resolution can pay $5 a month for that storage and access.
In addition to access to all their photos — without having to store them locally — MyShoebox uses metadata stored within those photos to help users organize and search them. Without having to manually tag photos, the application will facilitate searches based on location, date shot, etc., using natural-language processing.
The startup was cofounded by Steve Cosman, who was project manager for augmented reality on Windows Phone, as well as Kalu Kalu, who was lead engineer on Blackberry Universal Search. MyShoebox is based in Toronto and is part of the Extreme Startups accelerator there.