Everpix wants you to love your huge photo collection again

Everpix made waves last year with its promise to store all of your digital photos in the cloud, with no limitations. But the company’s true goal is actually far more intriguing: Everpix is aiming to make you love your digital photos again without having to worry about organizing them.

Today, Everpix is debuting a new Windows application that will let you synchronize your entire photo collection to the company’s servers. Everpix’s website has also been updated to work with iOS and Android browsers. The company already has apps available for iOS and OS X.

“We want to build the future of platforms for photos,” said Everpix co-founder and chief executive Pierre-Olivier Latour in an interview with VentureBeat. “[To accomplish that] you need to build many pieces first … we spent a year-and-a-half under the radar, the last thing we wanted was to grab too many users.”

Now, Latour says, a “solid chunk” of his vision has been executed — and he’s ready to prove it.

“People are missing out the key thing: people’s photo collections are growing very rapidly and they’re getting out of control,” Latour said.

Since cloud storage is extremely cheap these days, the company lets you upload as many photos as you like at their full resolution. Latour boasts that Everpix offers the fastest method for uploading and viewing your photos across multiple devices. Without having to worry about storage, Everpix makes dealing with your photos similar to Gmail — you never have to delete anything again.

Everpix has also developed a patent-pending image analysis technology that can identify objects, scenery, and other details.  That allows Everpix to highlight interesting photos and group together similar shots so you can appreciate them instead of wasting time with organizational details. (Or in my case, just letting your photos pile up without any organizing.)

Photos are always the focus of Everpix’s user interface — unlike Flickr or Google+, where you may get distracted by lots of menus and options. Everpix purposefully made its interface monochrome, to help the photos pop better.

The startup is aiming big, so Latour made sure to avoid offering the service for free from the beginning. You can sign up for Everpix for $5 a month, or for $40 per year. Latour says he’s open to a potential freemium model at some point but notes that that’s a complex detail to figure out. For now, the subscription fee could push away casual users (but then again, those may not be the customers Everpix wants).

It took an overnight uploading session for me to put my 40 gigabyte photo collection on Everpix, but once you get over that initial hump, it constantly keeps track of new photos in your library to upload automatically. Once your photos are processed, you can view them on the Everpix site, or via the company’s mobile apps. The “Moments” section in Everpix gives you a thorough glimpse of your photos based on their date, while the “Highlights” section pulls out the best shots throughout the year. In my testing, both the iPhone and iPad Everpix apps were zippy and rendered photos well.

“It’s a very ambitious project, and it comes with a number of challenges, from financing and technical, to building the apps, designing the user experience, and managing the load,” he said. “They’re interesting challenges because we’re not building an app like Instagram where you would use it every single day; we’re mostly looking at weekly active users.”

Looking forward, Latour says he wants to help people reengage with their photo collections in new and interesting ways. The company is currently testing out an experimental exploration feature on its website, where it will randomly show off a selection of pictures that have something in common.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised around $1.8 million in funding from Index Ventures, 500 Startups, Kii Capital, and 2020 Ventures.