About
Why I Built PictaBase
Chris & Shashana — and yes, that’s Wiley in the homepage demo.
I spent 30 years in Hollywood post-production, cutting film and television — credits include The Flash, FBI, and Extreme Honor (IMDb). Connect with me on LinkedIn. I have been the person digging through drives at 2 AM looking for the one shot a director needed now. I watched continuity photos, location scouts, and dailies disappear into folder graveyards — and I saw what it costs when a production cannot prove what it documented.
Before any of that, I put myself through Columbia College’s cinema program with four years in the U.S. Army — the first Gulf War — then saved enough to open my own editing company in Los Angeles in 1997.
From folders to a database
PictaBase started as the tool I needed on set: a searchable visual database where every image is tagged, organized, and retrievable in seconds. Then inspectors started using it for claims evidence. Then construction superintendents, museum curators, animal rescues. Turns out every industry has its own version of “IMG_4872.jpg tells you nothing.”
Built the hard way, on purpose
When the Hollywood strikes shut the industry down and our family’s other project — PIFster, a pay-it-forward charity platform — lost its lead developer, I taught myself AI-assisted development and rebuilt it from the ground up: fourteen-hour days, six months, one founder. PictaBase is built with that same discipline — strict typing, static analysis, and a test suite that runs before every deploy. It’s a one-person company, which means when you email support, you get me.
Why the deal is honest
I’m a lifetime-deal buyer 45+ times over, and — like you, maybe — I’ve been burned by too-good-to-be-true deals that died the moment the invoices came due. That’s why PictaBase’s economics were modeled before the price was set: fair limits, portable data, and a sustainable cost structure. This is a product built to still be here.
The rest of the story
My wife Shashana spent her own Hollywood decades as Head of Hair & Makeup for productions like Dancing with the Stars. We live in East Los Angeles, where our home has become a sanctuary for street rescues — three dogs (Micky, Wiley, and Bela) and a cat named Max. Wiley is the pup wearing tags in the homepage demo. The same pull toward the vulnerable is what birthed PIFster; our faith is what carried us through the hard parts of building it. PictaBase is veteran owned and operated.
— Chris Conlee, Founder
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