Lyve Home

Lyve Home is a very interesting spin on photo archiving, combining the picture frame with network-attached storage (NAS) to create what seems to be a brand new device category.  It’s about the size of a tiny bookshelf speaker, and Lyve concentrates on videos and photos. To use, you simply plug in the Lyve Home, connect it to your network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and start uploading your pictures and videos.  Alternatively, you can do this manually via and SD card slot on the device or via a USB connection.

Lyve Home Connection

Lyve Home’s real magic comes from the fact that it can connect to other devices. Through Lyve Home’s AppThrough app, you can hook the Lyve system into iOS, Android, MacOS or windows. It then automatically copies all of your images and videos to the Lyve Home device, where they’re stored away for safekeeping. What’s better is that you can view them by watching them automatically scroll along on the device’s miniature touchscreen display. Both the Home hardware and the Lyve app work in tandem with each other.

Bottom line, the Lyve Home is a networked hard drive backup system with a touchscreen, specifically designed for checking out pictures. Lyve calls this “a solution for experiencing, rediscovering, and sharing” your memories.

Lyve App

By itself, the Lyve app is something to appreciate. Even if you don’t use the Lyve Home hardware, the app makes for a fun way to scroll through your photo collection, letting you zoom in and out of dates as you get a comprehensive pictorial view of your time line. By default, photos only copy to the Lyve Home from your phone when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, but you can set it to upload over the cellular air if you so choose.

The main homescreen displays your collection in a tiled format that resembles windows Phone’s. It’s made up of differently sized photo squares and thumbnails that animate, flipping around to show you other items in that date’s gallery. Next to each gallery, is a brightly colored tile displaying the date for that collection. Lyve also includes a “timeline” section, where photos are laid out in a horizontally scrollable format, again organized by date. Finally, you can also star photos and videos to favorite them, view their metadata, delete them, view your “just added” items, and share photos and videos via email, SMS or social media.

Lyve Memory

The Lyve Home has a ton of memory, 2 full terabytes to be exact. Lyve Home is the larger of the two drives at $299, while another called Lyve Studio is $199. They offer 2 TB and 500 GB, respectively.

New “Mix” Feature

The app that  helps you manage, view and share all of your photos and videos, just launched a significant new feature called.

Mix is a new way people can easily capture and share photos from private or public events. Whether it’s a wedding, music festival, concert, bachelorette party, work convention, family reunion or just a night out with friends, the new Mix feature will allow you to seamlessly share photos among a group of any size, anywhere, without ever having to ask “Can you send me that photo?”. What’s more, if you’re unable to attend an event, you can access a Mix via an email or text invitation and follow along or even contribute your own photos as that event is being captured by attendees.

Mix is easy to host and join. steps and features below:

• The user can either create a Mix as a host or easily join a Mix that has already been created
• A Mix can be made private or public. (ie. at a music festival, you can set it so just your friends can contribute or make it public and anyone within that festival area using the Lyve app. can join and contribute.)
• Mixes are geo-targeted for public use, which allows any Lyve app user to view the various Mixes open near them and join (as long as they are public).
• Users can create a private mix for invited family and/or friends through their Lyve account – this is great for the likes of birthday parties, weddings, work events, etc.
• Once you have joined a mix you can start populating it with your own photos using the in-app camera or add existing photos from your camera roll. You can also select photos other users have posted and download one (or all) into your personal photo library.
• Mix allows for easy, automatic sharing after an event, eliminating the post party – “can you send me that photo” hassle.
• No more taking screen shots and saving photos from a hashtag – all parties in the Mix can have access to high res 2k photos.
• Share with friends on any device – for the first time, you can share photos across platforms – iOS and Android are both compatible with Lyve
• Access to participants – Mix allows all participants to see who is in the Mix allowing you to connect with people you might not have known were attending the same event.

Bottom Line

Lyve Home is a tight package with extreme organization in mind. Let’s be honest, how many times have you ever wondered if there was a piece of hardware that could save all your photos and videos securely, once and for all. Lyve home is the answer.

“Other companies offer free solutions only up to a certain amount of capacity,” explains CEO Tim Bucher. “Lyve’s free solution is unlimited though. You can have as many devices, as many photos, and as many videos as you want. The difference is that we don’t store the originals in our service – we only store the mobile-optimized versions,” he says.

Lyve’s app makes photos and videos accessible in optimized formats, for free, wherever you are.  That’s the real beauty with the whole Lyve product line. And at $300, the Lyve Home is a little salty, but the device offers a nice design with extreme ease of use. (www.mylyve.com). You can purchase through Bestbuy.