Lost Photos makes it possible to securely retrieve photos from email accounts.
Have you ever received photographs by email, but forgot to save them? If you’re anything like me, when you realize where you left those elusive pictures, you don’t want to spend hours sifting through hundreds upon hundreds of emails just to find the images attached to them. Well, look no further than Lost Photos to rescue your hard-to-find photographs.
Lost Photos by MacPhun helps you to discover the photos that are buried deep in your inboxes. It’s the first app of its kind that securely scans you email account for every photo you’ve ever sent or received. All photos that Lost Photos finds are downloaded and saved in a folder on your computer making it very easy to store them properly. Plus, you can share them again through social networking right from the app! Here’s how it works.
When you first open the app, you are shown a window with a decorative treasure chest containing photos and then a simple entry field for both your email address and its password. Once you enter information into those two fields, you’re ready to scan. There are a few additional options included for the scanning process. You can tell Lost Photos to ignore images smaller than 8K, which would pretty much rule out any email signatures, Ignore images in GIF format and ignore images sent before a certain date. This last option would help you to only find photos sent since your last scan. Lost Photos also gives users the option to sign up for a newsletter or upgrade the app within this advanced options window.
Once you have inputted all the necessary information, you click on “Find My Photos” and Lost Photos logs into your email account and begins scanning. I had it scan through my gmail account, which is quite extensive message-wise. Because I am only using the basic version of the app, Lost Photos stopped scanning once it reached 100 photos. This is where setting up all those advanced settings comes in handy because you could probably find the photos you are looking for if you limit the date and ignore the GIFs and files under 8K. The scanning process was very quick and it reached its 100 photo limit within about 2 minutes.
The easiest way to get past the 100 photo limit is to upgrade the app. You can upgrade it for $1.99 and be able to download 500 photos or upgrade for $2.99 and have unlimited downloads. Because I work in the marketing field, I have countless images in my email accounts that I have sent and received over the years. So, for someone like me, upgrading to the $2.99 version makes a lot of sense – especially when I know I will continue to use this feature.
Lost Photos works with the following email services – Gmail/Google Apps, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, iCloud, MobileMe/.Mac, Ymail, Rocketmail, AT&T, British Telecom Yahoo and Xtra New Zealand. The developer notes that more services will be added soon. Unfortunately, Lost Photos does not work with Verizon, SBC, ComCast, BigPond or any other email services specifically listed at this time.
Lost Photos is a very easy to use, well-designed app with a unique concept. I can highly recommend it for anyone who shares photos by email.
