Everalbum rebrands and launches a Shutterfly competitor

Everalbum is evolving its brand with a broader focus on how to help its users capture and relive their stored memories. The company now wants to be known as Ever and is launching a photo-book printing service to rival incumbents like Shutterfly.

“Our brand is about living fully, connecting with the people you love, and appreciating the moments you’ve shared,” the company wrote in a blog post. It emerged out of stealth last November as a blend of Google Photos, Storehouse, and Cluster, enabling users to back up photos from multiple sources, such as Instagram, Dropbox, Facebook, and Google+. And while it has already backed up more than 10 billion photos and videos, the company believes that its value extends beyond its mobile apps.

“Our mission is to help the world capture and rediscover life’s memories — digitally, and now physically, as well,” explained Ever cofounder Andrew Dudum. “This has been in the works for over a year now, and we finally landed the Ever.com domain, so we’ll be showcasing our product launches on our brand-new site.”

As mentioned earlier, the first product involves physical photo books, called Ever Books. The company describes these as beautiful publications that you can make using albums you’ve created within the Ever app. So far, nearly 500 million albums have been created around events like graduations, birthdays, vacations, weddings, and more. And creating a printed book can be done with one click, as long as you’re an Ever Plus subscriber (paying $9.99 per month for full-resolution photos and high-resolution video backups).

The company already prints photos, but hasn’t offered a bounded book format until now. Dudum explained that physical photo albums have been one of Ever’s most-requested features and that while people may flock to Shutterfly, Blurb, or other photo services, the current experience isn’t good enough. “It takes 15 hours, on average, to curate, upload, arrange, edit, and create a photo book through a typical service before purchasing,” he said. “With Ever Books, we’re taking an entirely different approach that takes 5 minutes — leveraging our machine learning, facial recognition, and the fact that users already store, organize, and curate their best photos in albums using our app.”

To create a physical book, select the photos you want to include or choose an existing album in your account. An algorithm will then extract the best photos — perhaps using Ever’s Explore feature — and orient them, aligning faces and laying images out on the page. You’ll have full control of editing and customizing your book. After submitting the final design, you’ll receive the publication within 3 to 5 days.

While making photo albums may not seem like a big deal, Ever is making the process easier, thanks to its integrations with the photos and videos on your computer and mobile device, as well as those stored on cloud services, including Microsoft OneDrive, iMessage, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Flickr.

Ever plans on releasing products in new areas in future, but Dudum declined to provide specifics, saying only that they’ll be in both digital and physical spaces.

To help guide the company forward in its expansion of photo- and video-based tools and services for the mass market, Ever has hired  Doug Aley — a former Amazon product manager, Madrona Venture Group’s entrepreneur-in-residence, and Shuddle CEO — as the company’s chief revenue officer. By bringing a seasoned product manager on board, Ever is likely now getting serious about monetizing its service. For years, it has allowed people to freely access its cloud storage offering, but it may want to start monetizing all the data it has amassed and work on producing products that tap into people’s memories.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: Ever has introduced native desktop apps for Windows and Macs. Now you can access and organize your memories from a larger screen, instead of being limited to a mobile device. This could be helpful to those looking to create physical books, share images, and more.

“We want users to manage and enjoy their memories on any device using Ever. Our interests aren’t tied to any particular device, OS, or social network, so we want to ensure a great native Ever experience on any platform — much like other independent subscription services, like Spotify and Netflix,” said Dudum.

All of these features are available today.