Monument Smart Photo and Video Storage Device - 1TB External SSD Storage Included

Good Product

Never could get it to work. They say i damaged it when installing the drive (one of the compatible ones on the list). I followed their instructions…. Though the usb drive option never worked right either, figure that out… Their support is slow and bad. I’m convinced it’s one person. They won’t work with you at all, the warranty isnt worth the paper it’s printed on. Read reviews on the App Store, it’s 50/50 whether it works. It only uses a completely obsolete drive format that’s not as ubiquitous. And they’re clearly moving to a cloud storage company, it’s only a matter of time before they fold the hardware division and everyone is back to google. I wanted this to work but their lack of customer care made that impossible for me.

Here's another example of a product in the last stages of beta testing that somebody insisted was ready for market. It's a good idea with software that's not quite finished. The sales pitch is that the Monument device will quickly and automatically suck up your photo files, store them on a drive of your choice, and organize them in logical ways, and let you find them when you need them. It succeeds at the first job, partly succeeds on the second, and falls flat on the third.Should you buy it now? Maybe. If you're a casual photographer who uses a cell phone camera a lot, this might be just the ticket for your 1,000 photos. If you're a serious photographer with a digital camera and 5,000 images, maybe. If you are a serious photographer with a large volume of photos, this is not designed for you...right now, but maybe someday.PROSSetup was quick and painless using my iPhone.Immediately on installation Monument began downloading all photographs on the phone.Ditto on SD cards -- once you say "okay" and specify where to store them, the device sucks up all the little JPGs and camera raw files on a card, no questions asked.Image files are sorted by date and time of capture and sorted. The app displays them immediately in that order.CONSThis product is apparently designed primarily for people who make their photos with cell phones or casually with DSLRs. You must do the initial installation from a cell phone and the application seems intended only for use with cell phones or tablets. The only way to communicate with the device is through WiFi.Although the device is supposed to do facial recognition, it has not recognized any of the faces I've offered it so far.Likewise it has not organized images by any other factor except those embedded at time of capture -- date and time sequence only.It claims the ability to recognize "people" as a sort criteria but has not identified any in the several hundred photos of people I've already uploaded.The application includes a very primitive beta version of a desktop option that is clearly labeled as "beta." No serious photographer that I know of would try to manage a photo archive from a phone -- a desktop app should be the starting point and phone/table apps secondary.Although you can see your photographs in the app, and they are sorted at a basic level, you cannot do much of anything with them -- rotate, tag faces, send by email, or any of the many other chores we routinely do with photo software.MY TWO CENTSThe hardware seems solid and the installation was just as advertised. The Monument is new and the software currently does not seem to be quite ready for prime time, but I expect that will change...or the product will be getting a lot of three-star reviews. If the desktop application is developed to the point where it can do even the most simple actions reliably, the Monument will be a useful tool. I will be looking for software upgrades and if they show up as expected, I'll change this review accordingly. Till then I will keep using Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, and the other software products that are designed to keep an image collection under control.

Nice way to manage a lot of photos. I like that the storage is on your own drive you can also backup to another drive. so when the main device dies you still have all your photos. I wish it could import photos directly from other USB drives, like my old backups. I had to copy photos from my old backup drives to sd cards and then the monument could pull the photos from the sd card MN would have been nice to get the photos directly from the USB drive. When first setting this device up do not connect both wifi and wired connections, it will mess the entire process up and you have to start over. Instructions to set it up are vague at best. I really like how easy it is to make albums and sort your photos into them. It makes managing and locating years of pictures easy.