Fstoppers Reviews the Peak Design Everyday Tote

Peak Design is a camera accessory and bag maker that began on Kickstarter, producing the Everyday Messenger bag. They designed the Everyday Messenger in cooperation with photographer Trey Ratcliff, who supposedly had quite a bit of input on its usability. Peak Design recently released three new bag lines following its most recent take to the crowdsourcing site that started it all for them. I supported the campaign and, after a bit of a run-around with a delivery service clearly feeling the pre-Christmas rush, received the Everyday Tote in time for this review.

When you order the Everyday Tote, you are obviously looking for a specific kind of bag. Most camera bags come in the form of backpacks, shoulder bags, or some combination thereof. The Everyday Tote instead is, well, a tote bag. It will, however, easily transform into a backpack as well. That backpack is maybe not as comfortable to wear for extended periods of time as a dedicated photo backpack, but it will do.

The Everyday Tote easily has room for a larger DSLR camera body, two zoom lenses, and a good amount of the requisite gadgets, do-dads, and nic-nacs that photographers either have to, or like to, tote around. Its capacity is nominally 20 liters, and the bag includes two padded dividers and is fitted with a padded laptop sleeve that will take 13-inch laptops. If you're not carrying camera gear (fat chance, I know), the bag can be adapted to fit a variety of uses, including, as Peak Design points out on its website, as a diaper bag.

Overview

First impressions matter and this one's good: the bag looks great. Peak Design has updated the colorways in which they sell their Everday bags. They all now come in charcoal (as the Everday Messenger, their first breakout hit bag), and in ash gray. With the Everyday Messenger and other bags up till now, you were limited to charcoal or a beige-brownish color that Peak Design calls Heritage Tan. I ordered one of the company's small field pouches in that color, and while it's a nice enough accent for a small bag, it somehow manages to be at the same time a bit too loud and a bit too boring to want it all over my larger everyday carry bag. While the charcoal color looks a bit more technical and professional, I picked ash gray to match some other bags I have that I might use alongside the tote. Your mileage may of course vary quite a bit as to whether the bag's looks are important to you or not.

What I Liked

The bag is very attractive and well constructed. The straps are made from car seatbelt material, the metal parts do not look cheap, and the zippers – two each on the bag's two side openings – are smooth. The leather accents are real leather and feel and look great.

Obviously, Peak Design by now has some relationships with the Vietnam-based manufacturing shops that make its bags, and I found no mismatched seams and only a few stitches that weren't quite perfect. The Everyday Tote is made from the same 500D Kodra fabric that Peak Design uses in its other bags. It's light, sturdy, and if the company is to be believed, relatively water-proof. I didn't get the chance to test the tote in heavy rain, but the material looks and feels like something an old Macintosh would have been made out of, so I have no trouble believing this. The bottom of the bag is rubberized, so no worries putting it down on wet ground.

Peak Design's tote is very versatile. I have been carrying around a Qwstion tote for years that is now falling apart, and for which the Everyday tote was to be a replacement of sorts. The Qwstion often saw use as a camera bag, usually with some extra padded bag put inside, but it obviously wasn't made for carrying camera gear, and I quickly became frustrated with it when wanting it to fit that purpose. The Peak Design, by contrast, is padded, and further includes two padded dividers that will easily let you reconfigure the bag for different uses.

A sleeve pocket on the front of the Everyday Tote is useful for things you may need handy during the day, or for traveling. On my first longer trip with the bag, I stuffed a small notebook, a paperback novel, my passport (there's an extra, smaller sleeve within the larger sleeve that holds one perfectly), a Shoulderpod One smartphone mount grip, and a pack of tissues in there. I never had a problem finding anything. I also never worried I would lose anything stuck into the sleeve. It holds things – at least things that don't stick out too much over the sleeve – very securely. There's even a key loop that uses Peak Design's anchor link attachment system so your keys are secure as well as accessible.

The Everyday Tote has a magnetic latch on top that has just the right kind of pull to stay closed when you want it to and to open easily enough when you need to get to your things. To further secure your stuff, pull out the fastening strap that, when unused, slips into a latch on the front of the bag, and hook it into a loop attached to the magnetic latch. If you pull tight, the top seam folds over and holds the bag's contents securely (at least most of the time, see below for an elaboration on when this fails).

What I generally like about Peak Design is that they offer a whole range of carry options for cameras, computers, and accessories that all work together. Their Capture quick release plates will slip right into the Everyday Tote, letting you easily store and quickly access your camera while walking around. Their strap system is also quite simple and useful. You don't need to use any other Peak Design products with the Everyday Tote, but it's nice to know that there's an ecosystem here should you need it.

The Everyday Tote also includes a rubber bracelet that you can use to stick a small tripod to the outside of the bag securely. This is a nice touch, and works well enough (depending, of course, on how big your tripod is). That is, provided the bracelet doesn't get lost. I keep mine permanently stuck in one of the internal pockets, even if I'm not likely to carry a tripod.

What Could Be Improved

One problem I had with the bag was when I first tried to carry it in backpack mode. Because of the tote design, there aren't two backpack straps, but only one strap that does double duty as one of the tote handles and both backpack straps, depending on the configuration. This means that when you want to put on the Everyday Tote as a backpack, the leather part of the tote handle pretty much invariably slides through one of the loops that hold it on the top of the bag, and you will only be able to put on one strap. The armhole on the other side is now much too small since the leather part of the strap is on your back and won't easily slide back.

This is a bit hard to explain, but if you try to put the bag on as a backpack you will likely know immediately what I am talking about. The only way to fix this problem is to pull out both backpack straps before you put on the bag. This a simple solution, but I'm no dummy and I have a mild obsession with gear bags so I've tried a lot of them, and it wasn't immediately obvious to me. Even if you get it figured out, the Everyday Tote may still slip over one of your shoulders when you move, which is exactly the kind of annoyance you don't need while running through an airport.

Another thing that bugged me about the Everyday Tote is its laptop sleeve, or, more precisely, the bag's closure mechanism in combination with it. The bag is advertised for 13-inch laptops, and it technically does hold even my old MacBook Pro. Depending on how full the rest of the bag is, however, the magnetic latch, an otherwise minimalist and elegant solution, won't close completely anymore. You can still secure the bag with the closure strap, but there is a small gap constantly visible. If you're dragging your gear through the rain, that's unacceptable. If you have a smaller laptop that doesn't stick out of the sleeve on top, you won't have this problem. I suspect that the newest crop of 13-inch MacBook Pros will work fine as well, but I haven't had a chance to try this yet. (My sizing experiments were with an old school MacBook Pro, an 11-inch MacBook Air, and an 11-inch Lenovo Yoga. The smaller computers fit fine and without issue even if the bag was a bit fuller.

Finally, I found the internal organization of the Everyday Tote somewhat limiting. Most internal pockets are very flat, and there is not one zippered pocket. I always appreciate at least one small zippered pocket in a bag to keep easy-to-lose things like SIM cards, loose keys, or the like.

The Verdict

The Peak Design Everyday Tote is a camera bag that tries very hard to also work as something else. For the most part, it succeeds. I very much appreciate its non-camera-bag look. This means I can safely pack away expensive gear in it while not advertising to the world at large that this is a camera bag with expensive gear in it. If you're the kind of photographer who goes from a work assignment photographing a political protest or a prison riot straight to a Midtown Manhattan Martini lunch or a business meeting in the Empire State Building – and hey, I may have wished to be that person – you're not going to look out of place.

Like every single other bag out there, this is not the be-all end-all camera bag that will do everything you want. For me, though, it comes pretty close. It's a bag that easily lets me switch from a non-photography related day job to a quick photo session, and back to the board room. (Ok, no, I don't as a rule go to board rooms. But with this bag, I could). It transforms into a backpack for that quick sprint to catch a connection or a leisurely walk home. It can also safely be stuck onto rolling luggage, which makes a lot of travel that much more comfortable.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you don't need to carry any cameras, the Everyday Tote works perfectly as a business bag for the office, a book bag for school, or a variety of other uses. I even designated it as my overnight bag on a recent quick city jaunt, and had no trouble walking amongst Munich's many Christmas Markets with my small SLR, two primes, and a Fuji X100S in addition to a modest change of clothes, a few books, a water bottle, various chargers and cables, toiletries, batteries, and paper notebooks.

In short, this is a good quality bag with some clever design solutions built into it, and a few unfortunate quirks that may or may not matter to you. If you're in the market for a non-standard camera bag, you should definitely consider it.