Picture Keeper Review and #Giveaway

Until it happened to me, I never thought I’d experience it.  I was working on a research paper for business school when my computer screen sudddenly went black, then blue, then nothing.

I called Dell technical support and a nice guy in a Hyderabad, India call center told me I had experienced the Blue Screen of Death and that there was little to no hope of recovering my data. 

Even worse than losing the 20-page paper I was working on, I lost three years worth of digital photos I had stored in a file on my desktop. I was heart sick because I rarely (okay, almost never) backed up my hard drive. I know, I know, very stupid move.

Flash forward.  I now back up my hard drive every few days but I was really intrigued when I was contacted by the  team at Picture Keeper to try out their automatic photo backup drive. 

I received the PK 4 drive which holds up to 4,000 1MB pictures.  The Picture Keeper Drive comes in a number different sizes the largest of which, the PK PRO, holds a whopping 250,000 photos.
The model I tried, the PK-4 retails for about $29.99. 

Now mind you, I’m not a professional photographer and so my review is aimed at the casual, hobby photographer who’s looking for a simple and affordable photo back up device.

HOW IT WORKS

Picture Keeper works like a standard USB flash drive. A big plus for the tech phobic is that you don’t need to download any software because it’s contained in the device. Simply turn on your computer and insert the Picture Keeper drive in your USB port. Open the Picture Keeper program then click the start button to start your back up.

The Picture Keeper will search for any .jpg or .bmp files and download them on to the drive for safekeeping. That’s it. When I opened up the Picture Keeper to view my photos, they were indeed all there.

When you are ready to print, simply take your Picture Keeper drive to a Walgreen’s photo printing kiosk and print your little heart away.

 Picture Keeper Pros

• Picture Keeper is super easy to use. There is no software to install and I was able to back up over 500 photos from my desk top in less than two minutes with a simple three step process.
• No software to download. I’m always wary of having to download new software on my laptop so it was a bonus that I could bypass this step with Picture Keeper.
• Easy to follow instructions. Picture Keeper is definitely made for the non-tech savvy user. The instructions are straight forward and easy to follow.There is a technical support number to call if you get stuck but I had no need to use it.
   

Picture Keeper Cons

• Large photo files may reduce the estimated capacity of the drive. I couldn’t find many faults to the Picture Keeper so I did a search to find what complaints other consumers had.  The most common complaint was that when storing high resolution photographs the drive often did not hold the estimated capacity. The estimated capacity of the PK-4 for example is based on a 1MP photograph which is fairly low resolution. If you are a shutter bug who likes to store high res photos, you may be better off getting a Picture Keeper with a larger storage capacity.
• You’ll need to pre-sort your photos. Picture Keeper copies everything, even duplicate photos. So to make sure you don’t waste valuable drive space, de-dupe and organize your photos in a single file.

Overall, this is a handy little device and perfect for storing all of the photos I plan to take on my family vacation to the beach in South Carolina this summer.

Now for the Giveaway!

I’m going to give away one Picture Keeper drive to one lucky winner on Thursday. Entering is super easy and you may enter as many times as you like by doing the following:

• Tweet this post to your followers
• Leave a comment and let me know why you’d like a Picture Keeper drive.
• Like BossMom on Facebook here.

Update: Congratulations to reader Kenia who won a Picture Keeper drive to store her summer memories!

 Good luck!

Disclosure: I was given the Picture Keeper drive for review purposes but was not compensated monetarily. All opinions are my own.