Picture Keeper Review

The perfect solution for preserving your priceless memories

A few years ago, I got a frantic call from a friend who wanted me to come take pictures of her son immediately. It turned out her computer had crashed and with it was the first 3 months of her newborn son’s life. Of course, she had already deleted those pictures off her camera, never to be recovered again. With this story, I learned my lesson… sort of. I started making periodic backups of my pictures and spending a small fortune in burnable discs. Since the sheer volume of pictures I take monthly can fill up CDs and DVDs in no time, I ended up with huge stacks of discs of all of my pictures I backed up each month. I then had to figure out how to store those discs in the safest way without completely giving up my office. When one of those discs was horribly scratched and my pictures were unrecoverable, I learned my lesson again…sort of. It was then that I came up with the plan to just never delete my pictures off my memory cards in my cameras, a plan that hubby detests (loudly) every time he grabs one of my cameras and the memory card is inevitably full. Not only is it expensive to buy a ton of memory cards, I’m sure you can imagine that this is a pretty inconvenient plan for impromptu photo shoots.

And then I found Picture Keeper, a photo storage solution that both hubby and I can agree on wholeheartedly. My elation when I found Picture Keeper was only one notch below jubilant singing, and about 80,000 notches above how I (and hubby) felt about my previous picture backup system. Picture Keeper is a truly intelligent image storage device, and something that I think everyone with a digital camera (in other words, everyone but my dear sweet grandma) should own.

So, what is it, you ask? It is the roughly the size of a hair clip and looks just like a standard USB flash drive. But, what makes the Picture Keeper so cool, and why I’m absolutely raving about it, is how it works to save all your precious memories. Instead of putting in a USB drive and then digging through your photo folders to find all the pictures you have taken since your last backup, just hoping you don’t overlook any, the Picture Keeper automatically searches your computer for picture files and then securely saves them. Yes, automatically.

When the Picture Keeper arrived, I did absolutely zero reading of instructions, mostly because the little device simply doesn’t require any instruction at all. You simply plug it in and it does it all for you. The first time I connected it to my computer it had its work cut out for it, since it had to search through years and years of photos and files to find all of my images to save (see image on left of a portion of those files it preserved for me). It took a few hours for the device to pull them all and copy them to the Picture Keeper, which was fine because I had done it right before bed and I let it do its thing while I slept. When I woke up the next morning I saw the message that all my files had been successfully saved. Since I’m kind of a Nervous Nelly when it comes to irreplaceable files, I searched through the Picture Keeper device and was thrilled to see that every file was there (yes, I inventoried so you don’t have to). Then I simply unplugged it and put it in my purse – which is incredibly convenient because now I have the ability to bore just about anyone with my years worth of baby pictures or my trip to Spain, all on a moment's notice. Company beware.

Since the first download, I have done two other backups and am thrilled at the Picture Keeper service. All I do is plug in the little device and within minutes it has scoured my computer for image files that are new since the last backup and then it adds them to the Picture Keeper. No time lost going through files and folders searching for pictures, no worrying I missed important pictures, and no wondering if it was properly backed up because the Picture Keeper does all the work for me. They even have an email reminder service that sends you an optional message reminding you to back up, taking absolutely all of the guesswork out of saving your pictures.

Once the pictures are backed up on the Picture Keeper, they are easily accessible and organized in their original folders and subfolders. Genius, really. The Picture Keeper's file saving program is all run off the USB device, so there are no special programs to download in order for the backup to run. You can even use your Picture Keeper on multiple computers, which was great so I could collect all my pictures on my laptop and desktop and save them all onto the same Picture Keeper. I was even able to take my Picture Keeper to work with me and backup all the pictures I had stored on my work desktop throughout the years, all effortlessly and securely.

Random Rave: As cool as it is to save and store all your pictures, I found myself wishing that I had a Picture Keeper for backing up all my other files. I'm sort of an Excel junkie, and tend to create mass amounts of data sheets that are as near and dear to me as old friends. Imagine my excitement to find that the Picture Keeper can even be configured to save my entire collection of spreadsheets or word documents, just by changing the advanced settings on the back up. I'm. In. Love.

http://www.picturekeeper.com/

Price: $29.99 and up, depending on storage capability

Looks: Just like it should be, functional and sleek

Overall: The perfect solution for picture storage. Automatic, easy and secure – what more could you want?

And now for the Giveaway…

The wonderful folks at Picture Keeper have generously offered a Picture Keeper to one lucky Rave and Review reader! To enter, just visit the site and find out what size you would need to preserve all your precious memories. Then just come back here and tell me the size you would like and why you're excited about the Picture Keeper.

And, as always, there are extra entries available!
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On August 6th at 11:59pm PST a winner will be drawn, announced here and notified via email