I love Mylio

A good friend of mine named JP Duplessis joined a startup named Mylio and they built some really amazing photo management software. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I have to say, I really like it.

I was tired of the old Windows Photo Apps that are so, well, um, boring and feature limited and I was tired of my wife losing her MacBook and all her photos on it.

You should have seen the moment when we set it up in my kitchen and I could finally sync photos off her MacBook onto my Windows PC for the first time. I thought I died and went to heaven !!

I then added a bunch of photos from my son who is an avid photographer. He went on a hike in California (which is where he lives) and I would have never seen this photo, not in a million years of begging and pleading for photo backups. He works really hard in a startup and doesn’t have time for facebook. But now, like magic using the Mylio Cloud Sync feature, it pops up on my machine and I can enjoy a whole series of amazing shots of this Tiger Swallowtail butterfly.

So I’m now using Mylio to sync over 90,000 photos across 9 machines (I have a PC, laptop, a PC at work, and a backup NAS drive, my wife has MacBook, iPad, and iPhone, and my son has Android phone and a MacBook running Windows). I hear some users have over 1 million photos and even more machines, and that makes me feel good about the scalability of this app.

Nothing else came even close to “managing” this many photos, and Mylio is incredibly snappy. I can slice and dice and pivot through folders, albums, people, ratings, all to my heart’s content and I’m never waiting for a photo to load or for thumbnails to be generated. This snappiness is probably my favorite feature of the app. Who has time to wait for photos to load, like on all those “cloud” based photo sites? I don’t.

I’ve also used the built in photo editing features, and I love that all edits are non-destructive (they are stored in a separate *.xmp file). So any user can go back and reset the edits and try again to get a better result and as the app improves, even existing edits can look better after a Mylio update.

Of course, most of my photos are huge RAW files from a fancy Canon or Nikon camera and Mylio handles all those natively, no stupid OEM drivers necessary, which is fantastic. They must have done a ton of work to pull that off and I can “share” these as smaller png files on Facebook with a single button click.

So Mylio does everything I need with photos, in a fast, smooth and well-designed user interface.