Peak and Pic-Time start from different places

Pic-Time is organised around client galleries, one per shoot, delivered to the people in it. From its Professional plan, you can search your images by people, keyword and selfie; on Advanced, clients can too.

Peak starts from the library: every frame you keep, at full resolution, culled with stars, picks and rejects from the keyboard, and searchable by colour and by visual resemblance. A room for a client is filled from it, from a collection or a selection, rather than uploaded again.

Pic-Time’s selection request is on its Professional and Advanced plans. You set a deadline and, if you want, a required number of photos and a maximum; clients can comment on photos, you are emailed when they return the selection, and you can reopen it.

In a Peak room, on every plan, clients pick, give 0 to 5 stars and comment, pointing at a frame with #. When a client sends their selection you are emailed at once and their picks hold until you reopen them. Two days before the room closes, Peak reminds the clients who have not sent theirs, and one click files the picks into your library as a collection. Peak does not set a number of picks.

Pic-Time includes a print store with more than 30 labs on every plan, sales campaigns, coupons and gift cards, a portfolio page and a mobile app. From its Beginner plan up, galleries carry your logo and watermarks.

Peak has no store, no watermarks, no website builder and no app. If your galleries are where you earn from prints, Pic-Time is built for it.

Pic-Time’s pricing page lists none of these:

• Search by colour, weighted by how much of the frame each colour covers
• Finding similar frames across the whole library, with a burst of one moment told apart from a resemblance
• Removing the GPS location from delivered files, without re-encoding them
• Skipping a file already in the library, recognised by its pixels and its exact byte count

Pic-Time prices in US dollars. Professional is $25 a month, or $21 a month billed annually, for 100 GB of photos and 30 GB of video. Advanced is $50, or $42 billed annually, for unlimited photos under a fair-use limit of 20 GB a gallery and 100 GB of bandwidth a month, and 60 GB of video. The free plan’s 10 GB drops to 3 GB after three months, and a 30-day trial opens every Advanced feature.

Peak Pro is $24 a month or $240 a year, for a 400 GB library that holds photos and videos together, and rooms that stay open up to 90 days. Studio is $49 a month or $490 a year, for 1.5 TB and rooms open up to 1 year. Free keeps a 5 GB library with every search feature and 2 rooms open at once. Prices exclude tax.