Quick Look: Picture Keeper Media Backup

By Ethan Lee on October 16, 2009

With digital photography now in full bloom, families across America have gobs of digital pictures sitting on hard drives, across user profiles, and scattered about file system directories.

In many cases, it’s hard to keep track of those digital memories that track your life.

That’s where Picture Keeper comes in.

Developed by Matthew Stanchie a former employee of Hewlett-Packard who was frustrated at the thought of backing up family photos, the Picture Keeper is a pretty simple solution to the problem.

While Picture Keeper’s company, Simplified IT Products, markets the product as a picture backup solution, we thought the best benefit was that it consolidates pictures into a clean directory structure and database. When full system backup solutions are increasingly easy to use and reliable, there’s really no point to an isolated backup system only for photos.

This product makes it pretty easy to port photos from one system to another or easily share large albums with friends and family without the hassle of web uploads.

For PC’s it works by plugging in the Picture Keeper USB stick into an available port and autorun takes over. You click on the button to start the backup and that’s really it.

For Mac’s, it’s not that simple. You have to plug it in and then run the Picture Keeper software only to find that it didn’t touch your iPhoto collection (where most Mac users keep their photos). To crack into the iPhoto vault, Mac fans will need to walk through the ten step iPhoto tutorial available on Picture Keeper’s web site.

We put the product to the test first by hooking it up to an iMac for a quick backup of a few hundred photos. It worked flawlessly and within a few minutes our photos were on the USB stick. The coolest part? It kept our directory structure intact. We expected it to just chunk all of the photos in a central directory.

After the easy iMac test, we got mean and plugged the 8 gb stick into a Mac Pro chockfull of over 5,000 high-res pictures from our Nikon D700 (about 5 mb per picture). Picture Keeper made it to 1,377 pictures in 45 minutes before popping up a notice saying the disk was full.

The only real complaint we had about the product is minor but worth mentioning. The wrist strap was dog gone impossible to get on the stick. It was one of those “slide the small rope through the even smaller hole and try to get it out of the other end” setups. While that is highly upsetting on a $1,000 Sony camcorder, it’s not that big of a deal on a lower priced product.

To counter that minor negative with a strong positive, Picture Keeper’s web site was easy to navigate, and purposefully simple. We were able to find the iPhoto instructions within a minute.

Picture Keeper comes in several sizes up to 160 gb, but they show that they are a fair company by allowing users to just purchase the software for $19.99 and install it on their storage media of choice.

If you’re looking to consolidate your digital photos, share them with others and keep them safe, this may be a good solution for you.