Over the past decade, it seems safe to say that people have taken more photographs than ever before. Increasingly, the device of choice for snapping photos is the smartphone, but the problem is, what to do with all those images once you’ve snapped them, shared a few, and moved on?

That’s the problem SoMa-based Everpix wants to solve: Fixing “the photo mess.”

According to the company’s research, 53 percent of consumers store their photos in multiple places, 68 percent wish they could browse through their photos more often, and 77 percent are frustrated by the lack of organization of their photos.

Everpix has been building a semantic sorting platform for the past 18 months which takes advantage of the metadata attached to digital photos and automatically sorts them into a visual timeline of your life.

“People have all of these high-quality photos on their cellphones, and they are taking more all the time,” notes Everpix co-founder Pierre Oliver Latour. “With the coming of Google Glass and other wearable computer devices with powerful cameras, soon potentially every moment of your life will be available as a photo. That’s where we come in. We can help you organize your entire life collection of photos.”

“Our app can gather all of your photos from wherever they are now – from folders, iPhoto, Lightroom, Flickr, Picassa, Instagram, Facebook – everywhere – and it stores them in the cloud,” explains co-founder Wayne Fen. “The more photos people take, the more of a chore it is to organize them. It's simply unmanageable. You need a smarter system that can do that for you.”

The first layer of organization is by time, since that is part of the metadata embedded in each photo, and very often location as well.

Everpix analyzes the photos for other elements and groups those that are collections – such as shots from a concert or a trip.

“We add a semantic layer to your photos that helps classify them by the various elements our technology recognizes,” says Latour. “We can recognize if is a close-up, whether it’s outside or inside, a dinner, flowers, at a beach, etc. We have about 50 categories a photo can be automatically classified as in.”

In late June, the company launched an improved user interface including a powerful “Highlights” feature that can compress user collections in such a way that only the most representative photo from a specific date or event is displayed– along with the information that you have, say, 25 more photos from that date or event one click away.

“By showing you representative photos, Highlights helps trigger your memory as you can look back through all those photos,” says Fen.

Everpix also has a new feature called “Flashback” that resurfaces photos from a year ago today, two years ago or ten years ago – however far back your personal collection goes.

You can quite easily see an entire year’s photos as an overview, again organized as panels of the most representative photos and events.

Since Everpix syncs across your devices, you can actually have your photo collection with you all the time.

The service is available on the web and in iOS (android is coming), and is especially well-suited to an iPad, where roughly 30 photos are displayed at a time.

The company says the average Everpix user has 10,000 photos and is adding them at the rate of 1,500 a year.

The business model is Freemium. Your first twelve months of photos are free; with up to two free years via various incentives, like inviting friends to try it. But for people who want to get the most out of Everpix, and organize all of their photos, it costs $49/year (or $4.99/month) for unlimited years and storage.