Thanks to the iPhone, people are taking more photos now than ever before, but one problem continues to plague digital shutterbugs: how to get those photos off the device. Sure, we can upload and share them on social media, but few of us actually take the time to back up those full-size photos, and all those images that remain on your iPhone can fill up storage memory pretty quickly. It’s an issue many companies are noticing, providing myriad solutions. One such new offering is called Odysee, an iPhone app and cloud service that automatically syncs and backs up your photos, as well as videos, to a computer.
Odysee, which is currently free (it will start charging a $5 annual fee a year from now), works like this: Once the app is installed and account is set up (you can use your Facebook login if you wish), you can tie your phone to, say, a home computer, which functions as a sort of personal cloud server (Odysee supports up to 2GB for a single file, and up to 11 minutes of iPhone-recorded video). Once you give Odysee permission to access your camera roll, it will start syncing those photos and videos, and push them to the computer; the computer doesn’t need to be on, as Odysee will push the images to it when the desktop client connects to the Internet. It frees up space on your iPhone (it also works with iPad and iPod Touch), while your content gets archived. Right now, Odysee only has a Windows client ready, but a Mac version is forthcoming. There’s also an alpha version for Android that’s on the Google Play store right now.
Another issue that Odysee tackles is what to do with those images and videos after they’ve been stored. Unless you’ve shared them before archiving, photos and videos can end up in a digital graveyard on your computer, left to become marcescent. Odysee helps you remember those memories through a social media component: it saves a high-quality but lower-res version of your stuff, which you can access online and share them (via Facebook, Twitter, text message, email, or as a link). It also organizes them by year and month, and you can have approved followers automatically see your published photos and videos in their feed; photos can be manually shared with non-Odysee users.
As we mentioned, Odysee isn’t the only photo backup solution, but the company says it’s different from Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud in that you don’t have to pay for storage. Odysee recently announced that it has secured $750,000 in funding, and that it’s making available an API for other developers to incorporate Odysee functionality into their apps.
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