Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Stan Kinsey, the Founder and CEO at Collectionaire:
Q: Stan, can you tell us about Collectionaire and why you started the company?
A: With families taking thousands of photos and videos over the years, they often risk losing those that are most meaningful… of their family’s special events and vacations, their children’s best moments, and even those of their parents and ancestors. Our product works as a companion portal to photo cloud sites to allow a family to create an organized and shareable archive of their most treasured photos, videos and documents so as to never lose these special events and memories.
We looked at the leading photo and video cloud sites and, while their presentations were great, they simply were not designed to create a family archive. The challenge in using these sites is that none, alone, works best for all their media – they’ll likely need multiple cloud sites; it is difficult to quickly access collections and see what is archived; and it is often not possible to add context or a narrative to person’s life or an important event. Collectionaire was designed to fill this need, enabling a family to create an elegant, lasting, sharable archive of their family’s best moments over the years.
Q: How does Collectionaire work and who should use it?
A: The cloud is emerging as the best way to archive and share a family’s best keepsake media. With Collectionaire people will use any of the most advanced photo cloud sites (iCloud Photos, Google Photos, Flickr, Smugmug, etc.) that they may already be familiar with, and will use Collectionaire as a portal to one or more of these sites to organize their content into a shareable family archive with a clear and simple family interface.
The primary tech driver is that each of these photo sites provides “share links“ to albums or galleries created there, and Collectionaire uses these to link viewers to the photos and videos in the cloud sites. Families can easily create a table of contents for each person and family, and then use their family tree as their quick “dashboard” to access to their collections.
Q: What is it about Collectionaire that makes it different from any other photo sharing/organizing product?
A: Our product is different in several ways.
First, you won’t move your photos and videos to Collectionaire. They will remain securely and beautifully presented in any of several leading photo and video sites.
Second, Collectionaire allows you to create a rich table of contents history of each person’s life, and one of the collective family’s best moments, with descriptions and narratives if desired. Clicking on any preview image takes the viewer to the album in the cloud site where that media is stored.
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Additionally, most cloud sites do not allow long-form home movies of 60 minutes or more; and if they do, they don’t have the streaming features available in some other sites. For example, Google Drive, Youtube and Vimeo allow for a custom start point in a home movie which is highly beneficial in long-form home movies. So users will likely want their media in multiple cloud sites, with Collectionaire combining all media via one portal.
Finally, most all other sites use nested folders to access photos and videos, requiring a viewer to dive several levels down before they even know what’s in a collection. Collectionaire uses a Family Tree interface bypassing at least two levels of this for quick and easily viewable navigation.
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Q: What are your plans for Collectionaire going forward?
A: We continue to add new and exciting features to the product based on customer feedback and use. These include ways to customize one’s view; print their family tree and individual media collections; allow guest viewing and editing permissions; and create advanced uses such as e-books for their collection.
Managing thousands of family photos and videos taken over the years has become an increasingly daunting challenge. With more photos taken each year, the challenge only gets greater. We enjoy finding new and better ways for families to make certain that their best memories are never lost, easy to share and view and we’ve seen our subscriber base grow as a result.
