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I Found a (Safe) Home for My (Thousands) of Digital Photos

May 2, 2016 · by Tiffany Merritt · Leave a Comment

Thanks to The Motherhood and MiMedia for partnering with me to make today’s post possible. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. I only promote awesome, so get ready for a big helping of just that! 😉 

Where are your photos stored? If you are like most people, the answer is some combination of the following: in physical photo albums, on your phone, on your computer, on a computer that’s dead and that you need to revive in order to collect those photos, on Facebook, on Instagram, on a cloud service of some sort, and on an external hard drive.

All of the above is true for where my photos live. This is nuts, because my photos are some of my most prized precious possession. Not only is there no rhyme or reason to where I’m storing stuff, but also in many cases, these photos are currently at risk. All I need to do is lose my phone, for example, and most of the photos I’ve taken for the past 9 months would be gone, just like that. Why am I “organizing” my treasures in such a haphazard, and frankly, dangerous manner?

The answer is because I haven’t known what else I can do. Until now.

For the past few weeks I’ve been using a new cloud storage service called MiMedia, and I finally feel as though I’ve found the right home for my digital files. I understand the platform, I trust the platform, and I am VERY pleased with the performance of this platform that is designed to house all of your digital files (photos, videos, documents, and even music).

One of the fun perks of getting my photos uploaded to this service is that I’m spending a lot of time rediscovering photos that were stored away but long forgotten. MiMedia has quickly and efficiently filed them away in chronological order for me. This makes it shockingly simple to take fun strolls down memory lane and find sweet pictures of my little ones when they were babies. Here’s a photo I just rediscovered over the weekend of my oldest, taken the first fall that we lived in Chattanooga. It was so fun to see this again!

darah fall 2010

MiMedia is also developing the ability to collapse similar photos. Sometimes I’ll take 5 or even 10 photos in very rapid succession. MiMedia will soon be able to recognize this and then collapse those together so that your viewing experience while browsing your photos isn’t compromised, but so that you can still easily closely examine those photos if you’d like. And on a related note, MiMedia will not upload duplicates, so no worries if you have the same photo stored in 2 or 3 different places now. There will just be one copy on MiMedia!

And since I do take a large number of photos, it was important to me to know that deleting photos from MiMedia is easy, and it is! If I upload 15 pictures of a recipe I made, which is not an uncommon thing for me to photograph as a blogger, I can easily delete 14 of them and just keep my favorite.

Another feature I love, love LOVE is how easy it is to share content privately. Sometimes I take the most adorable pictures of my kids, but I don’t want to put them on Facebook simply for privacy’s sake (especially if the kiddos aren’t fully clothed). Through MiMedia I have the ability to share with select persons. In many cases, they don’t even have to have an account to view what I have invited them to view. If they’d like to leave a comment on the photo, they will need an account but as you’ll learn about below, MiMedia has a free account version that will do the trick just fine! People you select can also get notifications any time you have new content to share. This is pretty much the best news ever for any friends and family (like grandparents) who might not live nearby but who love to keep up with you.

And speaking of comments, this is a feature I LOVE!!! You can capture the comments of friends and family on your photos right here on MiMedia so that they aren’t lost in the Facebook shuffle, only to be rediscovered when they pop up on your memories. Facial recognition is also on the horizon for MiMedia, so you could set up a filter, for example, so that any time a photo is uploaded of one of the grandkids, the grandparents get notified, and you don’t even have to remember to send them a link or even to tag the kids. Three cheers for making life easier, MiMedia!

mimedia november 2014 photos

The tagline for MiMedia is “the personal cloud you’ve always wanted.” After using the service for a few weeks, I would say that they are true to their word! At a recent online briefing, I listened to CEO Chris Giordano talk about why he as a parent with a digital mess on his hands created MiMedia and what his vision is for it moving forward. I can say with confidence that the people behind MiMedia get what’s wrong with digital storage now, and they get how to fix it, and they get the importance of continuing to listen to what would make it even better, and to innovating again and again. Already MiMedia is an amazing tool, and it’s only going to get better.

There are SO many great things about MiMedia, and I’m leaving out several things in the hopes that I don’t lose you by writing a novella here, but I’ve just got to tell you one more super cool thing: MiMedia is device agnostic! That means that if you’ve got an Android or an iPhone, a Mac or a PC (or like us, a combination) it doesn’t matter! MiMedia can work with whatever you’ve got! It also means you can access your photos (and other files) from any device, too. You are not locking yourself or those you share with into one format, which is awesome.

mimedia is easy
How to Get Started

If you’d like to test the waters with MiMedia before making a commitment, you can try the free package (not free for a certain amount of time, but honest-to-goodness FREE), which includes 10GB of storage. This is enough to store some combination of the following:

  •  2,500 photos
  •  125 videos
  •  2,000 songs
  •  10,000 documents

The Basic plan, which is what I have, comes with 500GB of space can costs $85 annually (or you can go monthly for $7.99). That amount of storage can hold some combination of the following:

  •  125,000 photos (!!!)
  •  6,250 videos
  •  100,000 songs
  •  500,000 documents

We have used up about 1/3 of the storage but we still have a fair chunk of uploading left to go from all our various sources. We are definitely going for the Plus plan next. It’s only $15 more a year at $100 annually (or $9.99/month) and you get 1TB of space, which is pretty much INSANE! That can hold some combination of the following:

  •  250,000 photos
  •  12,500 videos
  •  200,000 songs
  •  1,000,000 documents

Additionally, MiMedia is offering a very special perk to my readers who want to try MiMedia at any level. Use code THEMOTHERHOOD2016 at checkout  for VIP treatment. Anyone who uses this code is going to get special promotions, information on contests (storage space giveaways!) and exclusive access to try new features through an opt-in program as MiMedia continues to grow and evolve, day by day.

Filed Under: My Favorite Finds · Tagged: digital photo storage, mimedia, online photo storage, photo hosting, photo storage

(GIVEAWAY! 5 WINNERS!) Serious Family Digital Organization Made Easy: AboutOne

December 13, 2010 · by Tiffany Merritt · 26 Comments

Tim and I are both really big fans of using Google Docs to try to manage our household in various ways. For many things, it works just great. But as life is getting a bit more complicated (just a part of getting older, I suppose), I find it not to be a totally comprehensive system. I’m finding myself overwhelmed with all the different documents and spreadsheets we are creating for various aspects of our lives and for Darah.

This is why I was excited to have the opportunity to review AboutOne. AboutOne is described as an affordable online storage system for families. Its design is more specific that what you will find at a place like Google Docs. It has categories for storing detailed information about everything from your best friend’s cell phone number to the amount you sold your home for (oh how I long to be able to fill that section out….PLEASE sell, house!!!). Best of all, the system is VERY secure, so there’s no need to feel concerned about putting your private information in the system. It’s on lockdown!

There are many great features to this site, but I want to tell you about a few that stuck out to me, in particular.

1. There’s a place to keep you medical records. This is so valuable! I can imagine taking Darah to the doctor for the first time here in Chattanooga (which reminds me…I need to schedule an appointment!) and being able to pull up a copy of her shot records from my phone (because yes, the odds are good that I’ll forget to physically bring them).

2. You can send pictures straight from your phone to your AboutOne account. Love that! This comes in especially handy when something cute is happening that you want to capture as a memory. I have so many cute pictures on my phone, but they never go anywhere because I don’t know where to send them!

3. You can keep track of the gifts that you get (or even that you have in mind) for loved ones. You guys would be so embarrassed for me if you saw the random scraps of paper that I often you to keep track of this kind of stuff. I’m very lucky if I don’t lose it before Christmas! With this system, you can also see what you got for the person last year. So helpful!

4. You can easily compile newsletters for your family based on the memories that you have entered throughout the month, or coming soon, throughout the year! I’m putting together our Christmas letter this way. Hooray!

When I first got started with AboutOne, I’ll admit that my launch was a bit bumpy. I was having a difficult time remembering to log in and make updates. About a week after I got started, I got an email from the company just asking how everything was going. I told them I was struggling a bit, and do you know what they did? They set up a web meeting with me to go over some of the features I hadn’t really noticed right away and to help me feel more comfortable getting around the site. That’s some of the best customer service I’ve ever experienced! I learned how to create newsletters for family and friends, which is something I’m using to the fullest for our holiday letter this year (which I wanted to have out last week…AboutOne, I wish you could magically prevent me from procrastinating, but I suppose you aren’t magic!).

I’m very happy to be using the AboutOne system, and I think it is going to be such a great landing pad for all the important things we need to keep up with as a family. I also really like that the company is very open to feedback and is continually making improvements so that AboutOne can be exactly what families need it to be! Digital organization, here we come!

And I just want to point out, I have BARELY scratched the surface of what AboutOne can do. I highly recommend that you check it out!

Buy it!: AboutOne truly is affordable, with a one year membership fee of just $30/year. You can also go for the $5/month plan, or even try AboutOne free for 15 days!

Win it!: Oh my, you lucky ducks! FIVE Stuff Parents Need readers are going to each win a one year subscription to AboutOne! How awesome is that?! The contest will run until December 23rd at 11:59pm EST when winners will be selected using Random.org. The winners will have 48 hours to respond to winning notification before the prize is forfeited and a new winner is selected. Open to residents of the United States. Limit one entrant per household, please.

Mandatory entry: Tell me about any struggles you are having with keeping your household organized (especially as it relates to any sort of data you need to keep up with). My answer: Oh my gosh, if you could see how I squirrel away tax info. Yikes, people. It’s ridiculous, and of course, doesn’t really work.

Additional entries:
1. Sponsor love: “Like” AboutOne on Facebook
2. Blogger love: Follow Stuff Parents Need on Google Friend Connect (find it on my sidebar)

Be sure to enter the other current giveaways, found on the sidebar of my homepage.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary subscription for review purposes. The opinions expressed here are strictly my own.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary subscription for review purposes. The opinions expressed here are strictly my own.

 


Filed Under: Giveaways · Tagged: aboutone, best online photo storage, digital photo storage, giveaway, online photo album, online photo albums, online photo management, online photo sharing, online photo storage, online photo storage reviews, online photos, online storage review, review

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Welcome!


Grab your beverage of choice (mine is iced coffee) and let's hang out for a spell! I'm Tiffany, and I've rambunctious little girls and a fierce desire to share any tip and trick I can find to make lives with little ones a bit less hectic and a lot more fun. [Read more...]

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