****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Overall I really liked this picture backup device. Used it to create a local (non iCloud) backup of the pics on my iMac (prior to most recent iOS software upgrade). Plugged in device & launched the pic finder & it started finding pics right away. I did end up having to stay near my iMac to keep Imac from timing out (going to sleep) and interrupting the search (& giving an error message saying ‘search interrupted’). Took about 30 minutes to save my iMacs pics first time thru from start to finish. Went back & confirmed that my pics really did get saved over onto the Picture Keeper drive, but found it had skipped some of my backep up iPhone pics & videos (that weren’t located on my IMac’s desktop or in the Pictures folder). Have been reading the FAQ & found out the device doesn’t scan entire hard drive (as it inplies), but instead starts out by scanning the 3 most likely locations where pictures are stored on the imac. It does have a custom search setting you can use to designate other ‘folders‘ to be scanned, but thus far I have been unable to get the custom search feature to locate my iPhone downloaded pics & videos—thus the reason I took off 1 star from my review. I May end up having to move these pics/videos to either over to my iMacs desktop or into my iMac’s pictures folder to see if Picture Keeper will find them then.I purchased the Picture Keeper Pro 1TB. At first I could not get either of my computers to recognize the Pro once I plugged it into the USB. After a tech email, it was a quick fix and once I plugged it into the USB and launched it. On one computer I had nearly 12,000 photos and on the other, older computer over 6,000. It took awhile for it to search for the 12,000 photos, as my computer goes to sleep after 10 minutes. After I adjusted the sleep time, the search and then backup went fairly quickly. I take a lot of photos, I have many stacks of CD’s that I have saved photo’s on. I have been looking at the Pro for a while and decided to start with saving my photos onto to it from my computer. My thought was, if I was satisfied, I would then download my CD’s back to my computer to then load into the Pro. It is likely that I will need to purchase another one. The only thing that I don’t like.....about a week after I purchased the Pro, it went to a lower price on Amazon!Plut it into your computer, click the app, and the device begins searching for photos on your hard drive. I used it on my main iMac and my MacBook Pro and it extracted 20,000+ images with 60% of storage space still remaining. I do think the item is 'way overpriced--I paid $200 for it--especially since I keep getting e-mails from the company offering additional units at steep discounts.The device does have its quirks, among them that it keeps asking me over and over again if I'd like to extract images from the same external hard drives attached to my iMac. I haven't had a chance to actually look at the images to see whether the device really does eliminate duplicates.In any case, it's nice to have a large storage device for irreplaceable images that has no moving parts to go bad. It's a giant flash drive that should provide very long-term reliable storage.Really is plug and play (I use a MacBook Pro). A couple of clicks to let it know what you want backed up and it went to work. Did take longer than expected, big library, but it did what it was supposed to. I really like the feature that, once this one hits capacity, it will stop, allow another to be plugged in and then it will resume backup without loosing anything. Very handy and user friendly.I liked how quickly and easily the pictures transferred without my having to do anything extra or special. The label o n this external drive means I always know where our pictures are stored.If you have a Mac, it looks like this is a decent product based on other reviews - if you have a Dell (tried on two different systems with same outcome) it will launch and find your files, but not save them and not store to the Seagate backup drive that is in the little plastic box with an algorithm to find images and videos with barracuda backing... with that and half a day wasted - response from support "... it appears that there may be a compatibility issue with the specific external hard drive you are attempting to pair our product with....." haven't tried it in my Mac system, but after half a day lost, I can do the algorithm on a drive that is less in cost.I purchased this to back up pictures from a pc and a Mac. But you can only configure it to work with one OR the other. So I haven’t used it yet. I’m backing up my pc photos to a cloud service instead. Then I will just use it to back up my Mac.Product performed as advertised, was easy to use and filled the need for large capacity storage.I am hoping that this does back up files other than photos - I am hoping this will solve all my problems in saving all my files.How easy and took all my pictures--31,000 in 3 hours
