Steve Cosman was out travelling in Peru with some friends, and ran up against a very ordinary, very modern problem. Everyone had photographs of their trip, but they couldn't easily exchange them. It's a glitch many of us encounter on our own, even—without adding other people into the mix. We have photos on camera memory cards, on our phones, uploaded to our Facebook profiles, on old computers we haven't thrown out yet, all images we want to keep, often taken at the same time, but none of them in the same place or accessible in the same way.
Enter
MyShoebox, a Toronto start-up that launched less than a month ago and has already racked up more than six million uploads.
MyShoebox is, as its name suggests, a virtual shoebox—a place where you can upload all your photos from any camera or device, search and flip through them easily, and store them securely. It's a way for people "to be able to unify their photo collections" to prevent them "becoming fragmented over multiple devices," explains co-founder Kalu Kalu. He and Cosman started MyShoebox in the hope of helping us make better use of our images as technologies multiply. The app is available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Androd operating systems, and provides free, unlimited storage for photos up to a certain resolution (1024 pixels). A pro version costs $5/month, allowing users to store photos at full resolution.
With several thousand people signed up already, MyShoebox is "definitely looking to hire," Kalu says. In particular, their current three person team is looking for engineers.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Kalu Kalu, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, MyShoebox