Lifecake Launches First Ever Private Photo Sharing Service Especially Designed for Families

I was recently contacted by the lovely guys at Lifecake to have a play with their new photo-sharing service. I’ve seen similar applications cropping up all over the place recently so thought it was a great opportunity to see what all the fuss was about. The concept is simple - it’s a place to share your photos privately (by email-invitation only) so you can control who is able to view images of you and your children. Not only this, but in an age where many of us are posting images to multiple platforms regularly (Instagram, Facebook etc) it acts as a space to collate all your photos and ensure your family & friends don’t miss out on your creations.

Lifecake scores major points for its simplicity. You simply upload photos from your social media profiles (and those saved elsewhere on your computer) at the touch of a button. The platform will organise them in date order to be viewed in a timeline. You can then add text for each photo, for each collection, or indeed anywhere along the timeline to highlight any major milestones or events. It’s then a simple case of inviting friends and family to access the timeline via a secure email invite.

Lifecake is an organised and private timeline of your child’s life – with photos, videos and milestones – that you can be privately shared with family on their smartphones, iPads or computers. It’s one single place to keep all precious moments safe. Unlike a Facebook, content is shared by invitation only and this is what makes Lifecake unique. Lifecake offers today’s busy parents a quick and private solution for keeping relatives and friends regularly updated on their children’s “must share” moments.

Designed specifically with busy parents in mind, it takes all the work out of organising, saving and privately sharing precious moments. But Lifecake is also for the grandparents and the rest of the family, so they can feel closer to the youngest members of the family and share in their lives. The smart system builds a real-time timeline so the user doesn’t have to – it groups all images and content uploaded making the management of the thousands of images we take of our children easy. Lifecake alerts them via a mobile app or email when new photos have been added and they can view and leave comments via smartphone, (iPhone or Android), iPad or by PC.

From a back-up perspective, Lifecake uses the same infrastructure Amazon.com use to keep content safe. It’s a great alternative to the faff of uploading to an external hard drive as it uses the internet to keep copies of data in multiple secure Amazon.com locations. This ensures any content is always accessible and safe. I guess the only limitation I can see with this is that I’ll still have to back-up photos that don’t feature Dexter, or those I have taken for this blog that won’t be relevant to friends & family.

Perhaps my favourite thing about photo-sharing with Lifecake however, is that it’s a closed environment. Unlike social network sharing sites, advertisers cannot access data and target campaigns at you and associated friends, family and communities. This means your family have a clean and spam-free viewing experience.

 

The timeline is very clean and sleek. Lifecake will group ‘like with like’ photos and highlights one-off shots. This is handy and looks great but I would hope to see that later updates will allow for greater customisation (background colours, font, cropping, highlighting etc). I only experienced a few glitches where I tried to upload some professional photos that had been saved to my desktop from a CD - these needed to be manually moved into position on the timeline. Otherwise everything was ordered perfectly.

I was expecting to have to cajole my family to accept my invitation to Dexter’s Lifecake, but it seems I was wrong. My dad accepted the invitation in seconds and has already picked a few favourites images that he wants to have printed onto canvas. I’m secretly chuffed about this as Dex is his first grandchild and I know how much he is doted on.

The application can be found on Google Play and in the Apple app store. Lifecake will give users space for 1000 photographs and an hour’s high quality video for free and following that invites users to become VIP’s for just £2.99 per month. This seems a reasonable price if the application plans on adding additional customisation.

I also tested out the photobook function that allows you to print your timeline images to a glossy hardback book. This is in early development stages so again is set to benefit from increased functionality over time, however it’s worth mentioning that I’m chuffed to bits with mine. Okay, it wasn’t the easiest to make if you compare it to some of the big boys in the world of photobooks - you couldn’t add multiple images to one page, it was tricky to navigate from page to page, and you couldn’t zoom in to check any supporting text you’ve added, BUT I am really impressed with the quality of the printing.

I make one of these books every year and this is easily better than last year’s (by a leading print specialist). The page are thick and glossy and the book is bound incredibly well. Dexter is obsessed with photos of himself so we’ve allowed him to leaf through - so already the book has withstood a battering from him! It continues to look as good as new and is now safely put away ready to be shared around the dinner table at Christmas. I couldn’t be happier with it.

Photobooks can be purchased for £35 plus shipping for an 80 page hardcover book. Additional pages can be added for extra cost. I’m happy to report this is incredibly competitive and I’d happily use Lifecake for future printing once some of the creases in the creation process have been ironed out. I’m hoping you can order canvasses, posters, calendars and other photo accessories over time too. From a users perspective, I’m happy to pay a premium for the ease of dragging and dropping images from my Lifecake timeline, rather than visiting a competitor and having to upload from scratch.

DISCLAIMER: I was given a photobook free of charge in return for my thoughts on Lifecake’s photo-sharing services, and the photobook service.