First, if you’re not familiar with Mylio (and you’re concerned about protecting your images, and you love the idea of having access to all your photos wherever you are), jump over to this link and see what it’s about, then come right back here (by the way, you can download a free trial while you’re there, but wait till later â” come straight back here). :)
I’ve been using Mylio since it was in early Betaâ¦
I was there for the launch in NYC and I think the people and technology behind it are truly amazing. But this weekend, I started over from scratch with Mylio, downloading and reinstalling the app and rebuilding the entire thing on my iMac (which amazingly only took about 25 minutes, including setting it up on all my mobile devices), but I decided to do all this after a talk with one of my buddies over at Mylio, Kevin Gilbert (you may have seen Kevin’s Ted Talk about the importance of protecting your images that I shared here on the blog last year), where he said something that made me completely rethink the way I use Mylio. He said,
"All the pictures of your lifeâ¦with you all the time.”
Now, he added an extra line to it, which I’ll share in a moment, but it made me rethink how I’d been using Mylio. I think I was influenced by a lot of top pros who literally now have their entire photo libraries, raw files and all, being managed by Mylio. There are users with over one-million photos being managed in one Mylio catalog (yes, they have one-million+ photos on their phone), I had a ton of photos in there myself, and yes they were now on all my mobiles devices â” tens of thousands of them, but when Kevin said that simple sentence to me, I realized something.
The RAW files I didn’t finish, the ones that didn’t “make the cut” â” the ones I didn’t like enough to tag even as a pick, or that the client rejected â” I was managing them all through Mylio. Why am I loading hundreds of thousands of photos I don’t like, just because “I can?”
So, I looked at the folder of images I do care about. It’s named “Final Images” and I looked at the size: it’s 126 GB, with around 23,800 photos inside it. It’s all my high-res final JPEGs going back for years from every family vacation, every photo book, every slideshow, every trip, ever photo I’ve taken with my phone, everything I actually care about. They are all in folders within that one big “Final Images” folder.
Those are the images I care about. Those are the pictures of “my life” that I care about. I would love to have all of those with me all the time, but I don’t have 128-Gig free on any mobile device, but today as I write this, I have every one of those photos I care about (23,800 or so) not just on my pon all my devices because Mylio’s compression (and smart sizing) let me add all those images to my iPhone and it only took up (wait for itâ¦wait for itâ¦)â¦
912 Mb.
That’s all. Not even 1-Gb.
I already had my “Final Images” on my backup drive at home, (attached to my iMac) so I just imported that one folder into Mylio and it did the rest automatically, keeping all the folders and file structure intact and the whole nine yards. In less than an hour, I had every image I cared about on my laptop, on my iPhone, on my iMac and on my iPad. Every photo! (and by the way, I can’t imagine a situation where I would want to show somebody one of the Raw photos I left on my backup drive. It would be like “Hey, wanna see some photos I didn’t think were any good?”).
I know every Mylio user will use Mylio in a different way, and I had been in that “keep everything with me always mode” and now I’ve shifted to “Keep what’s important with me always mode” and I’m absolutely loving it. But besides having them always with me, I was particularly tickled to go to Mylio’s “Flow” view (which does a beautiful job of displaying tall and wide images together like a completed puzzle) and see my entire life flow by in thousands of photos â” photos I literally haven’t seen in years (they were neatly tucked away in folders), but now I’m seeing them again as I flick through the years and I spent hours just looking. Exploring. Smiling. Tearing Up. Laughing. It was totally worth it just for that experience.
It helped me rediscover a photo that means so much to me
This is a photo of my wife Kalebra, which is one of my favorites of her, taken in Nafplion, Greece. It has such meaning to me because for most of our married life (26-years this year), she absolutely hated (mega-hated) having her picture taken. She really felt that she was incredibly unphotogenic and any time you tried to take a photo of her, she would put on that “This is going to look awful” face to ensure that she was right. Well, we’re on this beautiful island, and she looks so beautiful to me every single day, and now here she is in this beautiful setting and I took a picture of her and sure enough, her beautiful face contorted into that “This is going to look awful” look and so I walked over to her, and saidâ¦
“Honey, these photos are the visual history of your life. When our children look back on these photos, do you want them to see your beautiful smile, or this “please get this over, I know this looks awful” look you put on. You look like you’re hating the moment that’s not the way you want your children to remember you.”
She gritted her teeth and kind of smiled. But later that same day, we were in line for something and I called out her name and she turned, paused and gave me her real smile â” the one you see in the photo above, and I was just floored! She even stood there and let me take three or four shots!
I walked right over and said “Honey, you smiled a real smile!” And she said that she had made up her mind that she didn’t want me or our kids to look back and see her old “This looks awful, right?” look, and from now on she would be happy to have her photo taken; I could take as many shots as I wanted, and she would give a genuine smile every time. I was absolutely thrilled, and now she always flashes her gorgeous smile, and I have boat loads of photos of her looking the way she really does day in and day out. When going thru my “Mylio flow” I saw this photo, one I hadn’t seen in years, and it stopped me right in my tracks because I remember so vividly why this shot means so much to me. Time to make a print for my desk.
Kevin’s extra lineâ¦
So, I know one of Mylio’s main things is making sure your images are protected and backed up in multiple places, and I now know that as I’m traveling to Las Vegas for the WPPI show this week, that for the first time in my life, ALL my important photos are with me (by the way, the thing that Kevin added to the end of that sentence I mentioned near the top was the “marketing part” but it’s a powerful one” "All the pictures of your lifeâ¦with you all the time, for $4 a month."), but it’s helped me to relive some of the most important moments of my life, of my family’s life, and it’s changed the way I’ll use Mylio from here on out, and I’m more excited about Mylio today than I’ve ever been (especially since the latest version supports PSDs), so thanks Kevin, and thanks to my buddy David Vaskevitch for having the vision and passion to bring Mylio to life.
Hey, if you’re out here in Vegas and you see me strolling by, stop me and I’ll show you my photo flow in Mylio on my iPhone (don’t worry, I won’t show you 23,000+ photos. I’ll stop around 19,000). ;-)
Hope to see you at my Canon booth presentation (today at 1:45 pm and tomorrow at 10:45 am) , or at the Canon-sponsored “KelbyOne Theater” on the Expo Floor (I’m doing a free session on portrait retouching at 10:30 am today).
Have a butt-kicking, feeling-the-love, takin’ lots of photos Monday!
Best,
-Scott
Scott, I have a suggestion. I would love to see some of these awesome ideas (and yes this one is) as a class on KelbyOne. This is the kind of tutorial that would make it a much better deal for me! I would also like getting started with Photo Mechanic but can’t find an online class for it. Another awesome class would be LR Timelapse. I know it’s impossible to do all of them but i would love to see some at KelbyOne. You know if I owned a company like Mylio I would PAY you guys to make an online class!!
Here is the link the the episode of the Grid where they walk thru Mylio with the guy that created it. http://youtu.be/1ppm5AxN3ic
Scott,
Has the pricing changed? On the Mylio website the Basic pricing plan is $50 a year. If my math is correct, this is not equivalent a $4 a month. Is there a discount lurking somewhere?
I think the Mylio guy was talking in round numbers Vincent. “All the pictures of your life…with you all the time, for $4.16 a month.†just doesn’t have the same ring to it. :-)
Thank you, Bill :)
How about – “All the pictures of your life …with you all the time, for less each month than a single Starbucks Venti Cafe Mocha (currently $4.45)”. I think Kevin’s point is to have all your pictures with you all the time on a mobile device, and have backup protection as well, you are looking at pennies a day (ok 13.699 pennies if you want to be exact).
Vincent, send me your address, I’ll mail you $2. :)
They might want to start up their support site for comments and questions. Not encouraging when the link says “server not found”. FWIW
The tutorial video is also unavailable with the same error as above.
hi Jeff, we had an error on our support site earlier, we think it’s been fixed. Sorry for any inconvenience. -Sandra
Hi Dave, sorry for the page not found error, we had a glitch with our server this morning…we think we’ve fixed it, but please let us know if you’re still seeing error. — Sandra
Yup, working well now! Thanks.
Can’t you do the same thing with Lightroom Mobile? Assuming you have the Creative Cloud Subscription.
Many of my final images are in .psd format, which Mylio still doesn’t support.
Mylio now supports .psd files in version 1.1 which is available as a free upgrade. Go grab it off mylio.com and update your apps
I don’t have any images of me in the last 14 years here in the US, by myself or with my kids, and all my other ones from before are on film, sooooooo…Doubt Mylio can help unless Mylio wants to take some photos of me first. LOL There isn’t a single person in my family that can take a photo of me.
Hi Alexandra. It’s never too late to start. The next time you and your kids are out and about, have your camera or phone set to Auto mode and ask someone to take a picture of all of you. Be on the lookout for someone making pictures. That way you’ll “usually” have a better chance for a good photo. It can feel awkward, but most people are happy to oblige.
Alexandra – I embarked on a project of scanning in over 100 years of family images. I haven’t finished dating all the pictures. However, Mylio has an amazing calendar view. It is neat with digital images since they are automatically dated (see screenshot), but when you get the scanned images in it gets even better. Here is a screen shot of my calendar going all the way back to 1915, You don’t even need a scanner to set this up, one of the support people at Mylio created a family history using her iPhone to bring the old pictures into Mylio. The ones from 1918 are of my grandfather when he went off to fight in WW 1.
That’s cool…I should probably get onto scanning my old pics too…I think its great, I was just whining that I don’t have a lot of good pics of me and my kiddies…I’m most likely going to give it a try….:)
I will second every word of Scotts write-up. Mylio is an incredibly powerful photography tool that changes the photo paradigm dramatically, especially as it relates to viewing and protecting your images. I started using the program in early beta. I liked it so much, I wrote The Official Guide to Mylio now available on Amazon ( http://budurl.com/Myliokindle ) and Barnes and Noble ( http://budurl.com/MylioNook ). Thanks to Scott for a wonderful review (which you can read at the Amazon site). If you are interested, you can sign up for a complimentary keyboard shortcut guide at http://budurl.com/myliofs . Version 1.1 also recently shipped and if you sign up for the shortcut guide, I will also send you an email with the details of the changes in the new version.
Showing all my good images from any device in a clean interface with great support if there are any issues…I’ve been doing that for seven years with Smugmug.
Something you said caught my attention. You said all of your favorites are in that “final images” folder as jpgs,or maybe some psd’s too. I’m assuming a good portion of them were developed from Lightroom as you’ve said several times on The Grid. I’ve always heard that we don’t need to make a “final” export as jpg or tiff. we can just leave the file in LR and only export as we need a copy.
I used to always export a “finished” copy to use as a master, but no longer do that. But is that what you do since all of those files in your “final images” folder were jpgs?
Maybe this would make a good topic to discuss on LR TV too.
She’s beautiful in that moment! Really.
Scott, the story you told about photographing your wife is great example of what Sue Bryce is trying to promote — what she calls #existinphotos. It’s about how Moms are usually the ones photographing their children as they grow, and so Mom is never in any photos. I posted a link to your article on her Facebook wall.
Forgot to add Sue’s video about #existinphotos – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32XPzhI8is
I’ll need to tell my wife your Greece story, I’m always running into the same problem. Thanks for sharing that.
Scott, how is Mylio different than Lightroom CC? Doesnt it all do tne same thing- with a Lightroom App on your iPad/iPhone? Thank you! Jay