Everpix
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The world of cloud image hosting is currently exploding, especially with services like Adobe’s Carousal which promise to let you pull in photos from your iPhone, iPad and Mac onto cloud storage to be accessed anywhere. The newly announced Everpix takes a similar mindset of grabbing images from multiple services, and turns in up to 11.

While still in closed alpha, the service promises to not only combine images that you have stored on your computer, but also on just about every web service imaginable — including webmail — and then combine them into visually pleasing galleries.

Initially the app will be Mac and iOS only, and will talk to online services such as Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram. For offline tools, it can integrate with Lightroom, iPhone and Aperture, or just be set to watch specific folders for any new images added. It also syncs with your GMail account, and pulls in mailed images from there, with planned IMAP support to allow for any email account to work similarly.

What does the service do with all these photos? It automatically groups them into “Moments” based on date and time of capture, and then filters out blurry, out of focus, and under- or over-exposed images and puts them together into a web gallery. These are default set to private, but you can share them with other users to, so you could assemble all your family photos into a folder that it watches, and then have a static weblink where the grandparents could see them.

It’s still early stages for the service, and it won’t be seeing the light of day for some time, and there are plenty of questions that remain to be answered. The developers have cited that they’re using a “freemium” business model, but we don’t yet know what you will and won’t have to pay for. And as always, there are the questions of rights and privacy whenever you upload an image — are they going to attempt to retain any rights to your photographs?

However the concept of auto-assembled photographic albums that can weed out poor shots with software seems tempting for times when we all feel too lazy to do it ourselves.