Cloud photo management
I was having this conversation with a group of friends recently about how everyone deals with photo storage. Apparently I’m not the only one that has this problem, especially wen you have multiple people in a household taking photos on their phones as well as cameras.
Since I recently have decided on how I wanted to handle this, I thought I would share my process here.
First, the big shift I went through was not needing iPhoto any longer. All my past albums are in iPhoto libraries but going forward they won’t be.
Two main reasons. One and most importantly, in ten years can anyone honestly guarantee that iPhoto will even be around? If not, think of how difficult it will be to access your photos. Plus, since iPhoto is Apple only, I can’t guarantee (GASP) that I will be using a Mac forever.
Second reason is because iPhoto isn’t cloud-based and it’s bulky and tough to manage when it gets large. Ok, those are two more reasons. Plus, if I really wanted to I could still pull any group of photos into iPhoto to work with them.
So I decided I wanted a cloud-based, file-based photo storage solution. Every photo my wife and I take on our phones, and video, now automatically syncs to Dropbox. And I set up a folder on her laptop to sync to Dropbox as well, so every photo she takes with her professional camera also goes there.
Then after events, like our kids’ birthday parties, I go to Dropbox, see all of our photos and videos already there, and make a folder for that event.
Over time I might find the need to pull a years worth of photos down, double back them up on a hard drive (not both at the same location in case of fire) and then clear that space for the next year’s photos. Because in reality, any cloud-based system will get super expensive over time.
Lastly, I use Dropbox’s folder sync to my iMac (which has a massive hard drive) at home so all my photos are backed up locally too, just in case.
Since I use Dropbox for my file storage anyway, and I believe they are going to be around for a long time, plus they’ve made big improvements lately to the way they present photos on the web and their mobile app, this solution works well for me. It also allows me to share photos or events incredibly easily (just send a link) and allows me to access my photos anytime, any place. All of them.
It’s not cheap, but it gets the job done and when you compare it to other cloud-based systems it’s not much more expensive.
What do you use for your photo management?
I’m working as part of a similar Dropbox-esque application team that employes the same workflow. Another possible integration piece could be for automatic download of X number of files to the user’s device, to speed up rendering time…? Great article, thank you fir sharing!
I was having same problems as you with iPhoto, and I’m using Dropbox too. I’m very happy.
You should check tools like Unbound that let you see your Dropbox photos as an iPhoto library.
Thanks.
Oh man- what a painful subject for me. I’ve tried no less than 5 solutions. My wife still harasses me because we have (no joke) 6 disparate iPhoto libraries and apparently I’m supposed to be “good with technology”. :)
I used Dropbox for a little while for my photos. But that’s not their primary focus and the photo features haven’t evolved much. I might have to try it again if its been improved. I miss auto-organization features (how Everpix algorithmically made event albums, or ThisLife sorted by people’s faces) and built-in social sharing. I also can’t add my wife’s photos from her phone to my dropbox without her getting all my files (she has her own account and files).
I still think there is an opportunity for a photos-specific play (like Loom, which I’m currently using). Its not a sexy problem, ie Everpix shutdown because they couldn’t excite investors (meanwhile Snapchat is worth a brazillion dollars?). But, if done well, could be an extremely sticky opportunity.
@Santi I’ll have to check out Unbound. Looks interesting!
Personally I do think that Dropbox has made improvements on the way it handles photos/albums. Also, my guess is (though I could be wrong) that your wife probably doesn’t use Dropbox on her phone. My wife doesn’t, and she also has her own Dropbox account. Most people don’t use it on their phones. So I set up my account on her phone, told it not to sync anything down, but to sync all her photos up. That works great for us.
In the next 12 months I bet Dropbox either makes major strides on their own or buys an Everpix and integrates it.
This is definitely a problem without a graceful solution. I think what you’ve outlined above is about the best anyone can do without paying a ton… My coworker was really high on Everpix and I was surprised to hear they weren’t snapped up (by Google?)…
Personally I don’t bother trying to have 24/7 access to my photos. I’ve tried various solutions (including dropbox) but It just isn’t worth the effort/cost to me. I just have professional photos backed up on various harddrives and Iphone photos stay on the phone til it’s full, then I move them to hard drives.
I use Adobe Lightroom for all my photo organization and it has built in features for uploading to Flickr, but I just don’t do it… Lightroom is great for many things, but also has severe weaknesses in collaboration and network access. It’s meant for “1 computer + 1 set of images”
Definitely good call on using a folder structure vs. “whatever Iphoto does”, much more future proof…
I do have EVERYTHING backed up to BackBlaze, and if I ever get into a really desperate situation where I need a file/photo, I can login there and download it but that hasn’t happened yet.
Good ideas about Dropbox on the phone and having it upload only. I’m gonna try that. Thanks!
[…] Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive for business file storage, Dropbox for personal file and photo storage, and the Nibblr app to see the latest and greatest daily videos. It’s important to have fun […]
This is such a huge pain point for us (actually, all media really is.)nnnnWe have 25k photos/vids on iPhoto…13 years of three kids and life, and it’s unwieldy…five people now pushing device photos to the iPhotoStream. iPhoto eats 83 gigs of space. The photo recognition is pretty vital in organization, plus most of the photos are organized by events. My big fear in leaving iPhoto is the possible loss of metadata in migration, But I just can’t rationalize the massive amount of space on my local SSD.
Plus, can you really be 100% sure that you’ll use (or that there will even be) iPhoto in 5, 10 or 20 years? That’s the scariest part for me, I don’t want to look up and find myself not being able to use iPhoto (not on a Mac, they discontinued it, file sizes got too large) and then being in a real mess.nnnDropbox is my solution and if I move away from it, it will likely be to another cloud, file-based service.
Do you know if metadata created by iPhoto stays with the jpeg if I export an image out of iPhoto? I really don’t want to lose that.nnBTW, I don’t like being locked into Gmail either–but upgrading to Mavericks made me realize how proprietary Google’s mail tagging is…
Looks like you might be in luck, iPhoto should be able to send the metadata into a jpeg – https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4921
Thanks for the link Jeff. But it says the facial recognition metadata isn’t included in the exporting so it’s a big time bummer for me. Your next startup needs to be a metadata aggregator ;)
[…] – I store all my files and photos here. I pay $19.99/month and get 255.25 GB of space. The extra 5.25 comes from referrals. Knowing […]