The archive that stopped
My wife Eva is a press, event and portrait photographer. I’m not. I’m the one who watched.
Eva took over her father’s photo agency — and with it the archive: hundreds of thousands of photos on an old MS-DOS PC at home, delivered to clients over a static IP. It worked for years. Until it didn’t.
One day the server got hacked. Everything encrypted. The archive was locked, and so was the daily work — clients waiting for photos, no way to send them. That’s not an IT problem. That’s the business stopping.
From a fix to a service
So I started helping. First a Mac mini with a similar setup. Soon after, cloud storage.
Then a colleague of hers hit the same wall from another side: his photo database was retired, and he had to move thousands of photos somewhere reliable, affordable and simple. We showed him Eva’s setup. He asked if he could use it too.
His workflow was different. His delivery was different. We extended the system anyway — and ran it like this for 1.5 years. Then we reached its limits. Honestly, I wanted to give up. Then LLMs and Claude Code came along, and I started from zero. Same lessons, new foundation.
First do it.
Then do it right.
Then do it better.
↑ This is where we are now.
Who builds it
I’m Matthias, a UX designer. For the last 16 years I’ve been Head of Design and Executive VP at EBCONT, a large Austrian IT consulting company. There I learned what an enterprise-scale product really takes: business, product concept, UX and workflows, infrastructure, code and delivery pipelines, legal — and most of all, storytelling.
Eva is the first user and the hardest critic. If it doesn’t work for her on a deadline evening, it doesn’t ship.
What we build
We knew it would be a complex system. So we started with the simplest thing: drop your photos, see them in Picspace right away, share them with a client.
From photographers and from research we learned: there are good tools out there. But each one solves one piece of the job. So photographers hop between tools — and their clients hop with them.
Picspace is one flow, from the shoot to the client: collect, find, organise, share with control, deliver. That’s what we focus on, every time we design something.
What we won’t compromise on
- Your originals stay originals. A download is always the exact file you uploaded.
- Your photos stay in the EU. We don’t send them to a US AI provider on our account. If you want AI help, you connect your own key.
- Getting your photos in comes first. We’d rather tell you that you went over a limit than block your upload in the middle of a shoot.
— Matthias